Behind the Bastards - Part One: Kent Hovind: Fake Dinosaur Scholar and Accidental Child Killer

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Robert sits down with Molly Conger to discuss Kent Hovind, self-declared doctor of dinosaur studies for the Creationist museum he founded and somehow killed a kid with. Sources:  https://web.archive.org/web/20030618200641/http://www.drdino.com/cse.asp?pg=articles&specific=43  https://www.thedailybeast.com/preacher-kent-hovind-accused-of-enabling-a-pedophile-at-his-christian-dinosaur-adventure-land-theme-park  https://www.al.com/news/mobile/2021/08/alabama-evangelist-kent-hovind-arrested-on-domestic-violence-charge.html  https://web.archive.org/web/20110725013851/http://kent-hovind.com/  https://web.archive.org/web/20110725013851/http://kent-hovind.com/  https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/bartelt_dissertation_on_hovind_thesis.htm  https://www.facebook.com/groups/kenthovindsworstnightmare/posts/1960777454091374  https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2018/04/20/god-and-the-irs-and-kent-hovind/?sh=246a27c51f10  https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/03/31/creationist-kent-hovind-on-boy-who-drowned-at-his-park-kids-do-dumb-things/  https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind#cite_note-10  https://www.al.com/news/2018/09/alabamas_dinosaur_adventure_la.html  https://creationtales.com/blog/175-dinosaur-adventureland.html  https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/arts/darwin-free-fun-for-creationists.html?pagewanted=2  https://web.archive.org/web/20120517150221/https://creationtoday.org/about/dr-kent-hovind/   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kool Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. Our guest for this week, Molly Conger. Molly, welcome to the Porgam. Oh, I'm excited. I'm excited. Molly, what do you know about Kent Hovind? When you first brought Kent Hovind,

I had it mixed up with a different creationist with the same initials. I was thinking of Ken Ham. Oh yeah, it is weird that they have the same initials. So I have been to Ken Ham's creation museum where there are animatronic dinosaurs, but I have not been to Kent Hoven's dinosaur land. It's really weird now that you bring it up.

I mentioned Ham in here, cause he's like, Ham is the good creationist park, right? Like if you've seen, in terms of like, they put some money into that thing. Like if you've seen, in terms of like, they put some money into that thing. Like if you've been there, like if you've seen photos and stuff of like online, it's the one with like, you see like the diet, there's like a stegosaurus with a fucking saddle on it

and stuff and it's like- No Robert, I will have to send you the picture of me riding the Triceratops with the saddle on it, yes. Yeah, Triceratops. But that's like a decent quality model, right? Like at least in the photos, it looks like that's like a decent quality model, right? Like at least in the photos, it looks like they put some money into that place, right? I learned a lot about how humanity used to coexist

with dinosaurs. That's great, Molly. Well, we'll be talking about that today. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration

of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced and dynamic as the black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine you're a fly on the wall at a dinner between the mafia, the CIA, and the KGB.

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Somehow the X-Ray Vision podcast has returned! And like always, we'll be here every week! You'll hear from TV writers, actors, comics, theaters, pop culture, critics... Nothing is off the table! Listen to X-Ray Vision on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kent Hovind is like, not even the Kirkland brand version of that guy, he's the Dollar General Ken Ham, right? Like he has- Don't besmirch

my beloved Kirkland signature. You're right, he's the Dollar General, like brand of that guy, because he also has a dinosaur amusement park, but it's dog shit and it killed a kid. So. Oh no. We're gonna have fun with this guy, Molly.

We're gonna have fun with this guy. So our subject this week is Dr. Kent Hovind. Is that a real doctorate? It's never a real doctorate on this week is Dr. Kent Hovind. Is that a real doctorate? It's never a real doctorate on this show, Molly. Reverend doctor. Like a third of the time, maybe it's a real doctor. Yeah, he is a Christian educator

with a passion for debating evolutionists. He believes that evolution is a religion and arguing that there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. He also runs, as I said, a dinosaur slash Bible-themed park that doubles as a compound for what is kind of a cult? A lowercase c-cult. I will say as cult leaders go, he's not good at it. Maybe he doesn't really want that much control

because he doesn't seem to exercise as much of it as a lot of them, but it's still pretty bad, right? I mean, if there's no automatic rifles or child marriage, is it really a compound? Molly, I will say there's probably automatic rifles because it is in Arkansas, but as for the rest of it, I don't know, he did get a kid killed there, so I'm not gonna say it's very good.

Hey everyone, Robert here from the future, and I fucked up. I wrote this both ways. The reality is that Kent Hovind now today lives in Alabama, not Arkansas. I don't know why I said Arkansas so much other than I was very hung over from a variety of gas station drugs when we recorded this episode. So you can chalk that one up to me being gas station sober these days. Again, Kent Hovind lives in Alabama now, not Arkansas. I might argue that some of this is the fault of people in both Alabama and Arkansas

from being two different states when we all know they should be the same state. But that's rather beside the point. Kent E. Hovind was born on January 15th, 1953. I think he was born in Pensacola, Florida, but I don't feel great about my, yeah, not a good start. He may not have been, this may just be like bad AI summaries of stuff,

although I found it in places that are not AI generated, but he seems to have immediately moved to East Peoria, Illinois and spent most of his childhood there. He's there until he's like a young man. So I don't know if he was actually born in Illinois, because I haven't really found a good direct source on that, but probably born in Florida, moved immediately to Illinois. I've come across basically nothing solid

about his childhood or his parents, except for the fact that on numerous occasions, he has said that he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior on February 9th, 1969. So he's about, what is that, 16? Yeah. Yeah. That's great.

Now, we talk about this on the show occasionally, but it bears reemphasizing that like in our cultural memory, 69 is like the summer of love, hippies and weed and, you know, anti-war protests and all that good stuff. That's a pretty reductive picture of what's going on. Because right alongside all of that stuff, the civil rights movement and Woodstock, et cetera, there's the birth of a subculture known as Jesus people. That's also a thing that's happening here. There's a huge surge in really unhinged

Christian evangelism. Some of this is a reaction to the bad side of the hippie years, right? You've got, with free love comes a lot of people getting STDs, you have a lot of people overdosing on drugs, you have swarms of young people who don't really have any money crowding into San Francisco and winding up basically living on the street.

And a lot of these people get like disillusioned and desperate and one of the first of them to get disillusioned is a guy named Ted Wise. Wise was a sail maker who had a bad LSD trip in 1965 and heard the voice of God. That'll get ya. Yeah, that'll get ya. As a kid, when I did drugs, now I'm straight edge,

except for the stuff you can buy in gas stations. But as a kid, when I started doing drugs, I had this evangelical belief that a lot of young people get that like, man, if we could just put this shit in the water supply and fix everything. That is not how drugs work. I was very wrong as a 19 year old.

Were you in the CIA, Robert? Yes, yes, briefly, yeah, that's what everyone says. No, it turns out drugs can lead you in very bad directions and that's what happens with Wise. He starts working with a bunch of pastors in the Bay Area to take in runaway hippie kids and turn them into evangelists. This thing that kind of becomes the Jesus movement

starts in Northern California, but soon there's coffee houses and soup kitchens, churches and farms with communal living spaces, all real bent on Jesus all over the country. Now, Kent doesn't graduate high school until 1971, which puts him at the old end of the Jesus people generation. And the evidence we have suggests he was always more

in the conservative end of the Christian spectrum than some of the Eastern mysticism inspired Jesus people. Cause like you get a lot of, in some of the Christianity that comes out of the Eastern mysticism inspired Jesus people. Cause like you get a lot of in some of the Christianity that comes out of the Jesus people movement, you get a little bit of like, we've thrown a little bit of Buddhism in here. We stuck a couple of yoga practices in here. Yeah, we're still hippies, you know,

we are still smoking pot, right? But the cultural weight of that swing towards evangelical Christianity is definitely an influence on Ham. The preachers he's drawn to though are men like Jack Hiles. Hiles is an obscure figure to most Americans, but starting in the late 1950s, Hiles is kind of like, he kind of invents mega churches. That's who Hiles is.

He calls his church the independent Baptist church and it's crowned a super church by time in 1975 because it's noted a super church by time in 1975 because it's not just a place where people will go on Sundays, he builds a Bible college there, unaccredited obviously. He builds what becomes one of the largest Sunday schools in the country. So there's all these like ancillary buildings

and programs attached to the figure. And so thousands of people become members. And this is kind of like the first precursor to what becomes the mega church, right? This is like the Australopithecus of mega churches. Cool. Yeah, that's Hiles. That's who Kent is going to be kind of like

obsessed with as a kid. Hiles is like a very triggering last name for some reason. Every time you say it, I feel like- He should be British with that last name, right? He should be played by the guy who played Niles in Frasier. It does, it feels like there'd be a villain in some movie with that name, is what I'm saying. Played not by Christian Slater.

He is kind of a villain, and Christian Slater might be able to handle this role. He can handle most things, he's a great actor. But Niles is a fundamentalist. He taught that people could not be born again unless they were brought to Christ using the King James Bible, which is, that's a big thing for, I don't know,

like a fifth of Christians in the country today that like the King James Bible specifically is the word of God. And all of the other older or newer translations and whatnot are wrong in some way. You just have, God came back to drop like a mix tape, a remix of his old hits, and this is the only thing you're allowed to listen to now.

I love this stuff. Hovind also admired a guy named Bob Jones Senior, who I'm gonna guess you've heard of. I've heard of Bob Jones University, absolutely. Yeah, well this is- A fine institution. Yeah, one of the great college, one of the great learning centers in our nation.

You know, I've always said, can you really be learning if you're not wearing pantyhose? No, no, and Bob Jones Sr. would say absolutely not. He was an American evangelist, one of the first Christian radio stars, and as you said, he founded Bob Jones University. He was also a segregationist, and one of the first Christian radio stars, and as you said, he founded Bob Jones University. He was also a segregationist, and one of the people who felt like

having a Catholic in the White House was gonna doom this nation to Papist domination, right? He's one of those guys who would rant about the Papists taking control of the government and mean every word. Oh, what a different time. I almost have trouble getting in the head of someone who is specifically scared that the Catholics are going to take over this country. We have one in there now,

and he's barely holding on. Well, that's only because the power of the pope has waned, Robert. If he had a more powerful pope, I think we'd be really in trouble. Yeah. The pope needs a thousand blood sacrifices to get his power level back up to where he can cast mammon out of the temples that we've built in Capitol Hill. I think that's right. Mammon, yeah, that's the god of money. So Ken's personal pastor was Lauren Dawson, whose gospel tape ministry was a groundbreaking

Christian business, sending more than 10,000 individual tape sermons out to anyone who wanted to buy them. This is like before the internet. This is if you want to spread your shit in an internet-like way. This is kind of how a lot of shit spread mimetically throughout what becomes the Christian right. And Kent is going to devour every one of these tapes he can get his hands on as a young man. And this is where he learns the secrets of public speaking and preaching as a business. In fact, if I had to draw together the similarities between the different guys

Kent admired as a boy, it would be that they all succeeded in turning their faith into an industry or industries instead of just a church, right? He's not drawn to pastors. Exactly as Jesus intended. Right. Money changing in the temple. Jesus' favorite thing. We all know he's huge into that stuff. The word of God is for sale. Yeah, absolutely. Why wouldn't it be? He didn't come back to rewrite the King James Bible

for you to not make a buck off of it, you know? So these guys are Kent's guiding light. And he decides his future is in Christianity, not specifically as a belief system or a way of life, because he does not live a particularly Christian life, but as a way to make a living. Specifically, he decides he's going to make a living in Christian education. Here's what he writes about his development past this point in 2012 on a website called Creation Today, one of my favorite news sources, Molly.

His keen interest in math and science throughout his high school career prompted his enrollment at Illinois Central College as a science major. After two years of undergraduate work there and feeling God calling him to full-time Christian service, he completed his Bachelor of Religious Education degree at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan in 1974. For 15 years, Hoeven taught high school math and science, during which time he completed his master's degree in education. While researching and writing his doctoral dissertation on the subject of creation versus

evolution, he saw the tremendous need for exposing evolution as a dangerous religious worldview and for arming Christians with scientific evidence that there are no contradictions between true science and the Bible. In response to these needs, shortly after finishing his PhD in religious education, he began a full-time ministry. Now- So he's teaching high school science? Not at all, Molly, all of that's lies. Every word I read almost was a lie.

Yeah, yeah, note the source. No, again, 70% of the time, if I introduce someone on this show as a doctor, they're not in fact a doctor. And yeah, basically everything he put, he may have done two years of college trying to get a science degree, but he didn't get a science degree,

which is about as impressive as the two years I spent considering getting a history degree, right? Like you didn't get it, it doesn't matter really. But let's start with the most basic claim up there, right? That he taught high school math and science for 15 years. This seems like it would probably be true. People usually don't lie about being a high school math and science teachers.

And like, there's a lot of teachers in the country, right? Teaching's not an easy job, obviously, but it's not impossible for cranks and weirdos to get teaching degrees, right? It happens. I've had a couple of them. Kent absolutely- And there are times and places

where you don't even need a teaching degree. Yes, yeah, well, that's exactly where Kent comes in, right? He does do some teaching, but it's not what you or I would call high school math and science teaching. The reality is that he gets teaching gigs at three private Christian schools, none of which are accredited,

all of which are run out of churches and one of them is run out of a church that he founded. There is no public record of him having a teaching career or evidence that he ever taught at something the government recognizes as a school. So there's nothing behind that really. He may have lectured about dinosaurs to some kids for 15 years, but we can't prove it.

The real science class is the friends we made along the way. That's right, Molly. That's right. So Kent worked as a pastor and a not really a teacher teacher from 1975 until around 1988. While he was still in school in 1973, he married his first wife, Jo. And I need to put emphasis on the word first there,

because for a man who believes divorce is a sin, Kent Hoeven does a lot of getting divorced. Not yet though, he and Joe are gonna have three kids from 1977 to 1979, which is too fast to have three kids. That's quite a rate. Poor Joe. Yeah, in that time, he started one private Baptist school and he worked as an assistant pastor at two others.

In 1989, dismayed by the growth of scientific rational thought in popular culture, he moved to Pensacola and created a new ministry, Creation Science Evangelism. The goal with this ministry was to promote creationism, and he begins traveling around the world delivering lectures about how to argue with evolutionists. He also sold merch, most of it dinosaur-themed, and this becomes a surprisingly successful business, ultimately. But it's a slow start at first,

and we're gonna cover what happens next, but first, Molly, you know what didn't get a slow start? Oh, is it these products and services? It's these excellent products and services that support our podcast and or program. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power.

Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Neil Strauss, host of the Tenderfoot TV True Crime Podcast, To Live and Die in LA. I'm here to tell you about the new podcast I've been undercover investigating for the last year and a half. It's called To Die For. Here's a clip. All these girls were sent out into the world and they were told, try to meet important men, try to meet important men,

try to attach yourself to important men. The voice you're hearing is a Russian model agent telling me about spies sent out to seduce men with political power. The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important cities. For the first time, a military train seduction spy reveals how the Russian government turned sex and love into a deadly weapon.

If you want to kill your target, it's easy. You just seduce him, take him somewhere, start having sex, and then he's very vulnerable so you can kill him easily. To Die For is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, acclaimed comics writer and notorious Scott Summers hater, Rosie Knight.

Well, hello, Emmy-winning podcaster and totally unbiased Targaryen royal supporter, Jason Concepcion. Rosie, somehow the X-Ray Vision podcast has returned. It feels so good. It does. And like always, we'll be here every week covering the wide world of TV, movies, comics, and geek culture.

That's right. We'll be talking about Batman, heroes of that stature, and of course, we'll be inviting our friends in the industry to come geek out with us and share stories. We'll hear from TV writers, actors, comics creators, pop culture critics, and more. Nothing is off the table because geek culture is pop culture, and we can't wait to share our love of it all with you every single week.

Listen to X-Ray Vision on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back and Molly, you were just telling me that some other iHeart hosts have been getting sent allergy medicine, which I could sorely use right now. Do you know what drug it is? Is that- I'm being honest with you, I skipped the ads, but I have sorely use right now. Do you know what drug it is? Is that- I'm being honest with you, I skipped the ads, but I have caught the tail end of a couple of them. Robert, no. Some of your colleagues.

No, they're not giving us money yet. Don't show for them. I know, I wanna know what it is. I want them to give us money. Some of your colleagues are getting allergy pills for free. Is it the stuff with meth in it? Cause I missed that shit. That was good.

That was the stuff that worked. Everything since has been bullshit. I don't think Parvatin treats allergies. Literally, that was. That was good. That was the stuff that worked. Everything since has been bullshit. I don't think Pervitin treats allergies. Literally, that was the best allergy medicine. And then they put them behind the pharmacy and you have to like- Because they're pissed at people doing shake and bakes. It's bullshit.

Like, what's the harm? A little bit of fucking biker meth. Come on. That's the best I could ever breathe, to be honest. And then all of a sudden they were gone or you would go and buy them and you'd buy a box and those were not the right bills. Yeah.

A time. Yeah. We need to have, if we're going to have all of these guns be legal, we need to have a standard where if you can't prove something is scarier than an AR-15, it has to be legal, right? Like shake and bake biker meth. Like that's not nearly as dangerous as guns.

Let people buy it over the counter. Come on, folks. People enjoy things, FDA. Yeah, come on, guys. We probably still have seat belts, but maybe we get rid of airbags for those weird airbag fundamentalists. I feel like that's a voting block

we might be able to conquer. Is that a real kind of guy? Oh yeah, Molly, that's absolutely a kind of guy. Oh, come on. There's about a million of those guys in the country. And if we get them on our side, we can legalize the good allergy medicine again. Anyway, back to Kent Hovind.

So Kent starts his new ministry in between earning his master's degree in Christian education in 1988, and's degree in Christian education in 1988 and his PhD in Christian education in 1991. Now I know what you're asking, Molly, because you asked this earlier, are those real degrees? Don't worry, we're getting to it. So for the first years of his career though, he lectures dozens of times at schools and Sunday schools and churches and Bible colleges.

He says he lectures at public schools. It's Arkansas and Florida. So there's a good chance he's not lying. And his focus is in laying tactics out for arguing against evolution, right? He's particularly obsessed with public debates and arming his audiences with this arsenal of like gotcha lines that they can use

to win public confrontations. And a lot of it has to do with like setting the terms of the debate in a way where you're not really arguing about evolution or like trying to lead people into these logic traps that he thinks he's built. But here's an example of the kind of shit he's doing. You're going to say, and where did God come from? And I don't know. But you said 20 billion years ago, there was a big bang and you don't know. But you said 20 billion years ago there was a big bang.

And you don't know where the dirt came from. So basically, I believe in the beginning God, and you believe in the beginning dirt. Don't tell me my theory is religious and yours is science. Oh no, sir, they're both religious. The news media tries to make it look like it is religion versus science. I did a debate in El Paso, Texas here recently

And there's made a media wrote an article. They said religious and scientific leaders debate evolution What is the unspoken message in that title? What are they trying to imply? Can you catch that they're trying to imply that evolution is part of science aren't they? No evolution is a religion It sounds like he's about to start rapping. It does sound like he's about to drop a bar. Really, I could feel it coming. No, he doesn't have that Ben Shapiro level of versatility.

No, he's the Ben Shapiro of dinosaurs. He is, he is. The background music is such a choice. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. But he dropped like, booo. He's like, did you catch that zinger? Yeah. Well, you see what he's doing there though, right?

He's like, number one, he's starting, he's not starting by talking about evolution. Like he's literally immediately taking the rails off of the debate because evolution has nothing to do with the Big Bang, right? Like he starts by talking about the formation of the universe and there's actually always going to be a degree of unknown, right?

Like we're never gonna get perfected. Now I would disagree with him. There's actually quite a bit because of the way that like looking at shit in the space works. There's quite a bit that we can observe about the early days of the universe that we simply cannot observe about like his beliefs about a God, but that has nothing to do with evolution

which is like, again,, mutations and changes in time over species, aggregating over the course of incredibly long periods of time, right? Like that has nothing to do with the Big Bang. That's a very, those are two separate things. But at the end of the day, I'm not an astrophysicist. I cannot tell you how dirt accreted in the emptiness of space to form earth

because that's not my business. That's not my business. But I can tell you that a child never rode a dinosaur. Okay? I can tell you a child never rode a dinosaur. And I can tell you that just like, you know, when we get into like the, the arcana of astrophysics, yeah, that's a lot of that's over my head.

When we get into the basics of evolutionary theory, all of that makes complete sense. I understand that quite well. Like, because you can see there's variants in just like the people you know. If you've had a bunch of different dogs and cats, there's variants in them. And some of the different variants that occurs naturally

as animals breed are going to be more adaptive to their environment than others. And over time that will change the species and that will lead to like the splitting into different species, right? You can see it on a micro scale in your own life if you have animals and you can understand how over the course of billions of years,

it would lead to much more drastic changes than you see in like a few generations of goats or whatever. Yeah, but who invented dirt, Robert? But who invented dirt? Fucking gotcha, I got you. It's these, these, I find it very frustrating. Yeah, anyway, I wanna play one more clip to you of Kent before we move on.

And this isn't him talking about evolution, but I came across it in my research and I do think it sets up some things about the kind of man he is. This clip is called Kent Hovind Goes Bananas. So I hope. It sure is, Molly. When I was about six years old,

I was raised in East Peoria, Illinois. By the way, I know I'm in Tennessee, but are there any more Yankees in the crowd? Any Yankees out there? Five, six, seven. Okay, how many Southerners do we have? Ooh, well, just remember who won, if you would. I know it ain't over yet.

I was racing east, so I couldn't help that, but I did move to Florida as soon as I got smart enough to figure out the South is gonna rise again. But no. So I just, I needed to play that little bit. What is the goal here? About the South rising again. To let people know that he's down with the Confederacy,

that he wasn't always, but now he knows they were right. He's like, oh, remember who won, but it's not over. But it's not over. It's such a weird splitting. I enjoy his five, six, seven hand motions. Yeah. I mean, those are like workman-like public speaking, you know, tech tactics. He's not bad, he's good at it like workman-like public speaking,

you know, tactics. He's not bad, he's good at it actually. You have to give him, like that's why he's successful. I got a little whiplash there. So one of the nice things about Kent, about writing about Kent, and also one of the frustrating things is that he started reaching for prominence

as a creationist debate bro effectively in the 90s, right? And if you remember the internet of like, particularly the mid to late 90s, early 2000s, a huge thing on the internet back then was internet atheists. And this community sometimes called the skeptic community, it's split in a number of directions in the modern era. Some of these people have gone

in very heartbreaking directions, right? We can talk about Richard Dawkins being like, now I'm a cultural Christian because I hate Islam so much. But there was this kind of, I'm not even brief, like a decade period where there was an army of everyone from forum trolls to guys like Dawkins who were just committed like pit bulls to hanging on and like latching onto arguments with Christians over creationism, right?

I'm gonna get one or both kinds of pit bull people angry at me for that comment. Look, I've been attacked by a pit bull. And I own one. I get to make that joke. Either way, Bill Maher is gonna be coming for me. He's another one of these guys, right? And because he was so prominent during this period of time,

there was like a whole information ecosystem dedicated to attacking Kent Hoeven. There were entire websites that are just picking apart his whole life and backstory with surgical precision because he pissed off just some of these maniac internet atheists who I love, I have very fond memories of, but who clearly were the kind of damaged where they would spend 70 hours a week

writing about Kent Hovind. You know? It's a thing, we don't really have that anymore on the internet. Like- We have Kiwi Farms. We have Kiwi Farms, which is like- But I feel like these people have the same sort of

mental derangement of the Kiwi Farms user. But they're not, you know, it's much more ethical because they're never going after harmless people. Like Kent is legitimately a bad guy. It's the same level of fixation but targeted in a good direction. Yes, and targeted much more narrowly, right? We just can't focus the way we used to, Molly.

So- It's just information overload. Yeah, one of the most detailed sites to pick apart Kent's life was kinthovent.com run by John Steere. Today the website is most accessible through the Wayback Machine. And if you want an idea of its age,

there was a running tally at the top of every page counting up the total cost of the Iraq War. So it's like, again, like just for a snapshot of the time this was written. Just a beautiful time capsule. Yeah, it's magical stuff. It really brought me back to my teenage years. So on that website, there's like a Q&A portion,

and one of the questions is, is Dr. Hovind a real doctor? And Steer writes, yes and no. No. So, it turns out Hovind did get a religious-based PhD from Patriot University, which then changed its name to Patriot Bible University. Does that not sound better?

They threw a Bible in there, Molly. How can that not work better? It's worse. It's better because it makes the acronym PBU instead of PU, right? Like that's just not great for a, they should have thought about that, but I don't know. Despite that questionable name,

PBU has been authorized by the Colorado Commission of Higher Education as a seminary or Bible college, which means it can grant religious degrees, but only religious degrees. It wouldn't be entirely fair to say these aren't real in the legal sense, but also Kent is going to spend decades identifying himself as a PhD in education and authoring scientific papers and calling himself a doctor, both to insinuate that his PhD has something

to do with science or evolution. It does not. Steer writes, quote, Patriot University also claims to be accredited by an unrecognized American accrediting association of theological institutions, which operates from the same PO box as Christian Bible College. Both AAATI and CBC are run by Cecil Johnson, and CBC is only accredited by, you guessed it, AAATI. This blatant conflict of interest could be a litmus test for the quality of AAATI. conflict of interest could be a litmus test for the quality of AAATI.

So I decided to look into this AAATI, this accrediting organization that accredits the organization that runs it, right? And it's just a diploma mill, right? For years it would offer, if you wanted to start your own Bible school, they would accredit your Bible school for $100 plus 75 bucks a year.

But the federal government does not recognize AAATI accreditation, right? Didn't Anders Bravik run a similar scam for years? Oh God, yeah, I think he did. I don't have enough recollection of that to wanna get into it, but I think you're right. Yeah, but he would make fake diplomas. So yeah, I mean, good company, good company.

We need to get into the fake diploma business, Molly. I'm getting a doctorate right now. I think I could offer degrees in, I feel like we should just try for medical degrees. Like, let's just see if we can get people putting out pills. You know? Or not. It's worth a shot.

No. Sophie, we'll debate this in private. Molly, Molly's on my side though, I can tell. She thinks this is a good idea. And I'm everyone's boss, so no. Speaking of good ideas, Molly, would you like to see Patriot Bible University? Oh Molly, I'm so excited.

Because it started as a Bible college in Dallas, Texas, but it moved to Colorado and it is currently based in what appears to be a double wide trailer. No, oh no. It's beautiful. Where's the- There's plenty of parking. Yeah, there's a lot of parking.

Is this just like the- Look, my college didn't have nearly this good a parking situation. This is like the front office. Like where's the rest? This is a man's house, Molly. This isn't even a front office. Where is it?

And having lived in trailers, I can say this isn't a particularly nice one. Where do the students go? Yeah, they don't, Molly. They send their money and in letters and they get degrees in the mail. It's just a guy with a Xerox machine. It's a guy with a Xerox machine.

Okay, solid, solid. So I could be a doctor is what you're saying. You could be a doctor. It costs about $1,900 or at least it did 20 years ago. I'm not sure now. That's a doctor. It costs about $1,900, or at least it did 20 years ago. I'm not sure now. That's a steal. It's a good price. So Patriot Bible University teaches young earth creationism

and charges monthly, which Wikipedia notes makes it, unlike most universities. They're on the DECA semester system? Yeah, that is unlike most real schools. Students can pre- It's like they have dodeca-mesters. Students can pre-pay for degrees, and in 2002 they offered a buy three,

get one free credit deal, which definitely sounds real. Okay, solid. I found a copy of their internal magazine from 2002, and this is a little off topic, but they have a whole page dedicated to suggested church signs. I'm gonna go through some of these, Molly. You wanna just read through these?

Oh, I love that. Because you see these, you know, you guys aren't in the South, but you- Yeah, they're all over the place? When you drive, you drive a rural road, you know, through the country South, and you gotta wonder, like, are they getting these from a magazine?

And I guess the answer is yes. Some of them yes. Let's popcorn read. I'll go first. God answers. Knee mail. Jesus. I've heard that one a lot.

The best vitamin for a Christian is B1. What does that even mean? Like vitamin B1, like B2, B12. Yeah, but what is the pun? Oh, like the best vitamin for, to B1. Oh, for a Christian is to be a Christian. That's not a good pun. To be one with Christ, Robert.

Yeah, yeah. Is B1 even one of the B vitamins? I don't know if it is, I've never heard of it. I think this is just a bad joke. Yes, there is a B1 vitamin FYI. That shows how much we know about vitamins. Here's another one. Tithe if you love Jesus, anyone can honk,

which seems kind of desperate. What is that? You don't even have to love Jesus. Wow. Oh, I know, they're saying tithe if you love Jesus because honking's too easy. Like fuck you if you're just honking. Yeah.

Give us money. Fuck you, give us money. A clear conscience makes a soft pillow. There you go. Prevent truth decay. Brush up on your Bible. I'm sure there are people who are brushing their teeth with their Bibles that read this magazine.

Christians keep the faith, but not from others. What? Don't gay keep, don't gay keep this shit. Let everybody into Christianity. And what part of thou shalt not don't you understand? You didn't yell, thou shalt not, it's in all caps. It is in all caps, it is in all caps. All caps. It is in all caps. These aren't even good.

Like I've seen a lot of- No, not of course they're not good. I've seen a lot of these and these ones aren't even funny. No, these are terrible. And it's filled with letters from like students and graduates this magazine and like inspirational little essays on how if you wanna be a good writer, the best book to read is the Bible,

which as a professional writer, I have not found the Bible particularly helpful. Not saying it's not useful, it's an incredibly important historic document. I have gained value from reading the Bible as a historic document, but I didn't get value in like learning how to write from it, right?

You'll do better with some fun again. There's a lot of beautiful turns of phrase. Yeah, yeah, there's also a lot of bullshit. Like Leviticus, you could mostly cut. Like if I'm editing that thing, I'm chomping down like half of those chapters, right? Well, you know, what is it like, what is it from, I think it's from Proverbs

about like, you know, the idiot returns to his folly, like a dog returns to its vomit. You know, that's solid. That's not bad, that's a good line. Like you wanna keep some of the gold. Like if I'm, I might do what Thomas Jefferson did and like do my own version of the Bible. And we're just gonna cold open on Jesus

fucking up those moneylenders in the temple and then like freeze frame and Jesus is like, looks to camera and goes, I'm probably wondering. That you're wondering why. Oh. We could make a solid 90s movie. Jeremy Piven plays Jesus Christ.

Yeah, probably shouldn't cast Jeremy Piven in anything anymore, but I watched PCU recently. So anyway, I find this kind of stuff fascinating. As a young, angry atheist, magazines like this kind of terrified me, but now it all seems so quaint compared to a lot of what's gone mainstream on the right. So I don't know, I don't know where I land there. The essay that closes out the issue is titled

Age of Reasoning? And it features a lengthy complaint that today's kids all know about Snoop Dogg, but not the Constitution. Then it ends- I'm always saying this. I will say, I gotta give him credit. I learned something,'m always saying this. I will say, I gotta give him credit. I learned something, maybe, from this.

Cause it ends with an insane story that I hadn't heard before. The story is told of Franklin Roosevelt, who often endured long receiving lines at the White House. He complained that no one really paid attention to what was said. One day during a reception, he decided to try an experiment.

To each person who passed down the line and shook his hand, he murmured, I murdered my grandmother this morning. The guests responded with phrases like, marvelous, keep up the good work. We're proud of you. God bless you, sir. It was not till the end of the line while greeting the ambassador from Bolivia that his words were actually heard. Nonplussed, the ambassador leaned over and whispered, I'm sure she had it coming. Now that's a fun story. Please tell me that's true. Please tell me it's true. Unclear, Molly. Cause I had the same reaction as you when I read that.

I was like, well, I want that to be true. That would make me like FDR so much more. Incredible. But I Googled around, Snopes has looked into the matter and the answer is it's like a maybe. It's kind of right on the line, right? It seems to have originated this story in a 1953 book titled,

The Complete, spelled in a weird way, Practical Joker by H. Allen Smith, who was a journalist and a comedy writer. And like, it's unclear if this is just bullshit or a thing he actually heard or witnessed. It may have just been a story that went around. I don't know. My guess is this is probably not literally true,

but we can choose to believe this. Yeah, this can be our Christianity, Molly. This is an episode about faith, Robert, and I have faith. Yeah. So back to Kent Hovind. His first PhD, he's going to get three more, and all of them are equally bullshit,

did require him to produce a doctoral dissertation. Yes. These are an important part of real life PhD programs. And a key aspect of like writing a thesis, right, is that to get your doctorate, you have to publish original work that expands to some extent, the frontier of human knowledge, or at least attempts to, right?

And it is something that is reviewed by a committee of relevant experts. They have to eventually sign off on it. And it is something that is reviewed by a committee of relevant experts. They have to eventually sign off on it and it is published somewhere that everyone can read it. This is the basics of like how that's supposed to work. Now, because Patriot Bible University isn't a real school, no one could actually find a copy of his dissertation for a long time.

Eventually- Well, it's in that double wide. Yeah, it was somewhere in that double wide. And eventually there's now a copy of his dissertation for a long time. Eventually- Well, it's in that double wide. Yeah, it was somewhere in that double wide. And eventually there's now a copy, it got posted on like WikiLeaks eventually. Which shows the degree to which the internet was out for this guy. Loaded for more WikiLeaks came.

Amazing. Oh, it's so funny. But eventually like an actual scientist reviews this thing and points out a number of things that make this not a real dissertation or thesis, right? When a real thesis is reviewed by a committee of three to five people with relevant expertise, Kintz was only reviewed by Dr. Wayne Knight

who runs Patriot Bible University and sounds like a Batman character. That's a guy from the Batman cartoon. Don't tell me that man's an academic. No, he sounds like a guest on the fourth hour of Infowars. There's actually, there's a substantially higher than zero chance that Dr. Wayne Knight has been on Infowars. I didn't think to look into that, but honestly, now that I think about it, that's the Dr. Wayne Knight has been on Infowars. I didn't think to look into that.

Honestly, now that I think about it, that's almost certain. Yeah. So, since Kent is gonna make his career badly defending creationism, it behooves us to look at the kind of claims he made in what is ostensibly the springboard of his academic career. One academic who reviewed his thesis noted,

"'Even the undergraduate honors theses at my institution require the signatures of two faculty members.'" academic who reviewed his thesis noted, even the undergraduate honors theses at my institution require the signatures of two faculty members. This fellow goes on to note that misspellings are rampant and cite several examples, including Canaan, which a Bible doctor really ought to be able to spell, and Shinto, he meant Shinto. Other criticisms include the fact that the thesis

does not have a title. It has one illustration, which is a diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum, literally cut out of an actual science textbook and taped badly inside the thesis. The reviewer notes it does not fit the page. And so what did he prove? That evolution is a religion and creationism is great. And so what did he prove?

That evolution is a religion and creationism is great. Well, actually we'll talk a little bit about his academic assault on the theory of evolution, Molly, and maybe convince you to give up your life of sin for the cleansing piece of Bible believing Christianity. But first- I'm diving right into that baptismal font when we come back from this break. Yeah, my only Bible and my only baptism

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All right, we're back. Kent is going to build his career attacking evolution. So let's look at how he attacks it in this thesis. Quote, Hovind begins with a non-standard definition of evolution, that with time, things left to themselves can improve, and a ramble about thermodynamics. For the first time, evolution is described as a religion. Hang on to your hats. He then proceeds to a long pair of inaccurate definitions of microevolution and macroevolution. He finishes this section with a second misstatement about evolution by pinning the idea of evolution equals progress

on the evolutionists. Now, there's a lot that's wrong there. I mean, for one thing, evolution is not things improving over the time when left to themselves. It's again, like random changes, some of which are going to prove adaptive, some of which won't. And that leads to like change in differentiation in species over long periods of time, right? It's not inherently improving.

Things don't always get better. Species don't always get better because of this. Like that's not what anyone's arguing for when they're talking about evolution being a thing. Wait, it's not like you've finished a science degree. No, of course not. Now, despite what guys like Hovind say, the theory of evolution is simple and hard to argue with.

Because it's such a reasonable thing, Hovind has to, like, the Catholic Church hasn't had an issue with it, longer than any of us has been alive, right? And it doesn't preclude the existence of a creator God. You could just say that God invented evolution, done. There's plenty of perfectly fine, like fucking YouTube arguments you can make

for evolution being integrated with a belief in God. I don't care how convincing you as an individual find them. They're all more convincing than what Kent is saying, right? So you could still believe in your God without being silly. Yeah, the Pope does. And he believes in a lot of silly shit. Yeah, but we have a woke Pope now, Robert. We do, we do have the woke Pope.

It's a huge problem. A real, real, real, real issue. So Hovind has to come up, because evolution is such an inherently reasonable concept, Hovind has to come up with his own straw man definitions of evolution to argue against. And they're always a little bit different. Later in his career, he's going to offer a $250,000 prize to anyone who can promise

empirically his word that evolution is real. And here's how he defines it for the purpose of this argument. When I use the word evolution, I am not referring to the minor variations found in all of the various life forms, microevolution. I am referring to the general theory of evolution, which believes that these five major events took place without God. Number one, time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves. Number two, planets and stars formed from space dust.

Number three, matter created life by itself. Number four, early life forms learned to reproduce themselves. Number five, major changes between these diverse life forms. And like, that's not evolution, man. You're wrapping a bunch of different things into like all together. Like the theory, Darwin's theory of evolution did not involve the Big Bang.

No, that started way later. It was way later. He was just looking at some fucking- Finches. Yeah, finches and shit and going like, oh, it looks like species differentiate over time. He tasted a bunch of different birds. Yeah, he ate every animal that he could

and worked out a basic theory. So far, what we've got here with Kent is a local pastor and teacher who's built a nice business for himself lecturing at churches and Bible schools about creationism. Now that's not a good thing, but on its own, that's not noteworthy enough to make him a subject of this episode, right?

There is something that makes Kent special, which is that he is one of, if not maybe the first of these kinds of guys to realize that the internet is about to be a huge deal and how to use the internet in order to make a shitload of money for himself and build a following, right? He is, I don't know if he's the first of this kind of guy,

but he's the first I'm aware of that really starts this with a website called Dr. Dino. He makes this in the mid 90s. And he starts selling and collecting and whatnot, a whole archive of creationist media all over the United States. Oh, is that Dino's for breathing fire? That it sure is Molly, wait a second for that one. of creationist media all over the United States. Oh, is that dinosaur breathing fire?

That it sure is Molly, wait a second for that one. I don't think they did that. Kint's main business is himself, but he basically sees if I film these presentations I've been giving at churches and edit them into videos and sell those videos or let people, you know, eventually stream them online, that will expand my audience. And there's ways to get money out of those people, right?

And I'm gonna show you a clip from one of his, yeah, he pivots to video. He does it first, right? And here's one of his Dr. Dino videos. Now this one is called a parasaurolophus. The parasaurolophus had a weird bump on the back of his head. Some people think the parasaurolophus was able to breathe fire.

Who thinks that? Because that bump on his head was hollow and it's connected to his sinuses. Hmm, I don't know about that, but it's an interesting theory. It is not. I like the parasaurolophus, but there's one thing about him I do not like. And I'm going to tell you about that in just a minute, okay? The whole speech is like that. He'll like introduce a dinosaur, usually get things wrong about it,

and then be like, I like this guy except for one thing about him. And then he'll move on to the next dinosaur. He didn't accept Jesus as his Lord and savior. That is kind of where we're going here. But I do want to let you know, folks, there are not fire breathing. No one thinks there were dinosaurs that breathed fire.

That's not a thing that science believes. That's not a thing anyone has ever suggested except for maniacs. The doctor Hovind said. Yeah. I think this is part of like, that you get some of these weird creationist guys trying to square like both dinosaurs

and myths about dragons together. Maybe that's where that comes out of. But anyway, here's how that whole speech thing culminates. When he finally explains what he doesn't, the one thing he doesn't like about all of these great dinosaurs. The one thing about all the dinosaurs I do not like. I don't like the way every time you pick up a book about dinosaurs, you open up to the first page and guess what it says? age and guess what it says? Billions of years ago dinosaurs lived on the earth.

That is not true. What you have to do, you have to get a little buzzer in your brain and whenever somebody tells you something that's not true you say, meh, not true. I'm going to have to go meh on Kent here. Okay, that's not fair to the dinosaurs. I like this dinosaur except I don't like this one thing about him. Yeah, the dinosaurs never said, they didn't have a concept of age as far as we're aware.

The dinosaur didn't write that book. Just wondering, do you think that the costume department on Friends based Ross Gellar's work clothes off of Kent? Yes, yes, they're both paleontologists. They're both dinosaur scientists. I know. And I also, I refuse to consume anything either of them make outside of their wheelhouse, right?

Ross is not allowed to be anything but Ross from Friends. I laid that out for you. I'm very angry. I watched some insane television show. I think it was, it is about like climate change and shit. It's on, I think it might've been Netflix and Ross from Friends is in a couple episodes cause it like veers from-

I've never seen him in anything but Friends. Does he still work? He was- Yes, apparently. Yes, he was, he played Robert Kardashian in the OJ series. That's right. It's this show that sounds like a fever dream.

It starts with like climate conferences about like the impending disaster. And then like, you know, the disaster really gets going in earnest, and suddenly everything pivots to being, I thought it was gonna be hardcore Zionist, but actually the point it seems to be making is that the real Jewish homeland is Miami, and there's a synagogue they're trying to save

in southern Florida from flooding, and Ross from Friends has to bribe congressmen to do it, and then he gets arrested? Is it called Little Death? No, no, no. It's one of the weirdest shows I've ever seen. I'm going through his- I don't think that's real.

It felt like a fever dream, and then the entire show changes after the Ross from Friends portion. Are you sure it's not called Little Death? It is definitely not called Little Death. It's called Extrapolations. Oh, then what else is he better? It's not on his IMDB.

Oh, there it is! I think he might have funded the fucker. It's weird, he's weird in it. It's from a few years back. Got it, got it, got it. It is an off-putting show. I found it off-putting. Oh my God, Jon Snow is in it?

Jon Snow is in fact in it. Yeah, a lot of guys are in it. Edward Norton's a big part in it, yes. Okay, I'll do this on my own time, sorry. I was like, what a cast, what are we doing here? It's a baffling show. They're like, are you a guy who will always be known as playing one guy on a TV show?

We'll cast you in this. We'll cast you. Edward Norton is more than that. Not much more. Yeah, he's Fight Club. He's in the only movie about the shitty town in Oklahoma I grew up in, Leaves of Grass. Good movie.

It's also got one of the guys from Deadwood in it. Check it out. He plays himself in his twin brother. Anyway, so Kent. Oh, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. Yeah, himself in his twin brother. Anyway, so Kent. Oh dinosaurs, dinosaurs. Yeah, we're talking about dinosaurs. We got Ross from Friended. We got Ross from Friended.

You can't stop when you get a little dose of vitamin R. So anyway, as a public speaker, Kent has a whole host of lines. He's got locked and loaded to get an audience's attention. And one of his favorite lines is, one drop of water will cover the whole world if you spread it real thin. Kent states this as if it's a scientific fact.

Don't worry. I found, again, cause there's a lot of guys who are obsessed with Kent. I found a crazy person who seems to know math, who did a breakdown and calculates that this, Kent is off by roughly a factor of one trillion here. Which sounds right. I can't check that math.

I don't know how to spread atoms. I don't know how big those are. But yeah, it does seem like that would have to be off by about a trillion or so. Honestly, that might be low. Because if you're talking about like baptismal water, I think it's more of a metaphor. Yeah, I think that's, but he also,

there's nothing that's a metaphor for Kent. You can't have metaphors in Kent's world. Everything has to be literally true. Otherwise his entire conception of reality collapses. Kent also claims that birds are not descended from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are also big cold-blooded lizards that live in Eden, which we know they're not.

The reality is that dinosaurs really have very little to do with modern reptiles, but Kent has to deny the sweep of time necessary to allow birds to come about. So he claims, for example, that the Triceratops is just a Jackson's chameleon that got extra big because there was more oxygen back then. Like if you were to hook a Jackson's chameleon up to an O2 tank, you could get it to be huge.

Like, why are we doing that? There is some scientific credence to the idea that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is why- I think we get bigger bugs. Insects used to be bigger because they breathe through pores in their skin, so they could be larger because of the different amount of- But they're not the same insects, you know?

And it's like, you can't just, if you just like, you can't just make a chameleon big. You can't just make a chameleon up to oxygen, it's not gonna turn into a Triceratops. I'm gonna put a pet chameleon inside of a hyperbaric chamber and I'm gonna grow a Triceratops. Yeah.

I'm gonna grow, I'm gonna get one. Like, look, if it worked that way, I would be psyched that the creationists were right, because then we'd have Triceratops to ride, and that would be worth it. I'll need a lot of crow to ride a Triceratopses to ride, and that would be worth it. I'll need a lot of crow to ride a Triceratops. Only inside your special oxygen chamber. Yeah, you would probably have to come in the chamber.

We just make the world a hyperbaric chamber, I assume. This guy is just Christian Science Alex Jones. It's very weird. Yeah, yeah, he's a little worse than that. Does he start selling products? He's already selling products. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got books and than that. Does he start selling products? He's already selling products. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got books and videos and t-shirts and toys.

And obviously, like a lot of creationists, one of the things that helps stitch Kent's beliefs together is the existence of cryptids, right? If the Loch Ness monster exists, right, it means that dinosaurs didn't die out all that long ago. That's exactly right. Yeah. Now, I know what a lot of you are asking at this point.

Kent is clearly a ridiculous asshole, but is he really noteworthy? And I assure you he is. We're going to talk about his real evil shit in part two, but I want to start by laying out how much fucking money he makes doing this grift. In 2003 alone, Kent earned more than $1.6 million in Dr. Dino merchandise sales.

From 1995 to 1997, his income tax bill alone was more than half a million dollars. And we know that because Kent was a tax protester and refused to pay his taxes for about 30 years. Yeah, of course, of course he's a tax protester. I feel like if you're truly only committed to God, is that like its own kind of sovereign citizen? He is a sovereign citizen, Molly.

That's where this is headed. But yes, also he's his own kind of Christian sovereign citizen too. He does both. So in 2001, he creates his first Bible-based theme park, Dinosaur Adventureland. Tagline, where dinosaurs and the Bible meet. I've heard this described as being built in his backyard

in Pensacola, but his backyard is like seven acres. So it's not like tiny. The park has an indoor science center filled with illustrated versions of the arguments Kent makes in his lectures. There's also an outdoor space with what can crudely be described as rides. One I've heard of is the jumpasaurus, which is just a trampoline next to a basketball hoop.

Kids have a minute to make all the baskets they can, which will teach them that they have to be coordinated in order to spread God's message. That doesn't make any sense at all. No, that's nonsense, kids. That's not a ride. That's nonsense. That's not a ride. That's nonsense. That's not a ride. That's a trampoline next to a basketball court. That doesn't sound safe.

No. I mean, look, I'm all for children risking their lives in dangerous games, but also, you know, they should be more fun than that. So for a while in the early aughts, some skeptic publications did a decent business making fun of dinosaur action land. But what actually brought Kent down wasn't being wrong about everything, because that never hurts people's career.

It was tax fraud. To describe what happened, and again, folks, this is a constant lesson in crime. Do whatever unethical shit you can get away with most evil things in the United States as long as you pay your taxes Like just and the IRS is not picky, you know They don't care if you're a drug dealer just pay your taxes and you will avoid the easiest way to Destroy your life as a person who is breaking the law because they'll get you in the end

They always they will they will they're actually know what they're doing. To describe what happened next, I wanna read a quote from a book by Professor Samuel Brunson called God and the IRS, which is about the difficulty the IRS has dealing with the religious right. It actually sounds very interesting. It's like $70 for the Kindle edition because it's a textbook.

So I have not read the whole thing, but I found excerpts that, because there's just a portion of it that deals specifically with Kent. Quote, though creationism was Hovind's professional passion, it was far from his only interest. Hovind was also deeply dedicated to not paying taxes. Hovind was as dedicated a tax protester as any. He did not file a single federal tax return between 1989 and 1996. The IRS noticed and demanded that Hovind provide them with

certain financial records. He refused. In fact, in his attempts to impede the IRS's investigation, Hovind went so far as to file a lawsuit against the IRS, demanding that the court order the IRS and its agents stop contacting and harassing him and that it order the IRS to stay off his property. So, you know, taxes are complicated, but the IRS is a simple organization. They just want their money. And they've spent enough time

as the bugbear of the Republican party that they are leery of having public fights with religious conservative tax protesters. So they don't go hard after, again, he stops paying his taxes in 89 and they don't really come for him until 2006. There's back and forths going on before then in the late 90s and early 2000s,

but they don't really go for bore until he makes it very clear that there is no other way for them to resolve this. I mean, he could have just all this time but just been doing his taxes, but doing them wrong and paying like $10. It probably would have been fine. And they wouldn't have wanted to come after a church.

But if you go out in public and you say, I don't have to pay my taxes because God said so. Right, right. And the big mistake he makes here is, Kent mistakes the IRS's hesitation to go immediately nuclear on him as an actual victory. And so during this kind of awkward period where he's fighting back and forth with them,

but they're not really coming after him, he decides he's like hacked the system and he starts lecturing and selling book and video guides to not paying taxes. Yes. Oh, they love those guys. They love it when you do that. Yeah, that's the easy way to make friends with the IRS.

There's this whole industry of guys who will like sell you their system for like, oh, if you just do this one secret loophole, it's not real, it's not real. I think the easiest way to make a lot of money doing unethical things would be to like become that kind of guy, but pay your taxes scrupulously. Like run a business on how people can avoid paying taxes,

but actually pay yours. They can still get you for that. It's still a federal crime to sell that shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's what's gonna happen to Kent. So some of his new beliefs come to be based on the arguments of what are called sovereign citizens.

Hell yeah. I think there's a decent level of like, at this point kind of background osmosis information the average person has about sovereign citizens. But in brief, sovereign citizens are people who believe that the arcana of tax law and constitutional law is a magic spell to make the government go away, right? If you figure out the right way to cite legal precedent,

then you can make the federal government not in charge of you, you know? Which it doesn't really work. Sometimes the law can be like magic, but it never makes you not a subject of the state because the state has a lot of guns, ultimately. I've only ever seen it in person once, but I was sitting through docket call

and this woman had some sort of like relatively minor traffic ticket that really got blown out of proportion because she refused to produce a driver's license. And so she comes up before the judge and she says, well, I do not contract with the Department of Motor Vehicles. And she just like, every time the judge asked her a question

or tried to get her to say something, she just kept saying, I do not contract with the Department of Motor Vehicles. And it's like, the judge was like, it doesn't really matter if you do or not. No one really cares. Lainey, I don't contract with the fucking us with the department of Homeland Security,

but that's not gonna stop them from coming after me if I do certain things, you know? Like you don't have to contract with the ATF to have to obey the rules they put in place. I do not contract with the Internal Revenue Service. Yeah. They don't care. They've got a lot of guns.

Ultimately it does come down to that. I kind of love that she was like, that's my line. Yeah. Gotcha. I mean, she got that from a guy like Kent, right? Because Kent gets, obviously, I don't know who he gets brought into Sovereign Citizen. It's kind of like a decentralized cult ideology,

but he starts spreading it too, like after he gets into it, right? And here's a quote from one of the videos he puts out during this period of time that gives you an idea of how these people talk. I do not have or use a social security number. Actually, no real person has a social security number. Notice on your social security card

that your name is spelled with all capital letters. This designates the straw man business, trust or corporation, not a person. Right, so you can sue or imprison the all caps straw man that my card is for, but that's not really me, so I don't have to go to prison for all of these crimes. Again, man, even if you were right, which you're not, this is nonsense, like there's not actually legal press

in here, but even if there was, they all still have the guns That's the like as an anarchist. I also don't believe in the legitimacy of the state But I recognize that they have more guns than me, you know Yeah, I'm gonna try not to get them too angry at me cuz I don't want to get shot I don't want to get a ruby ridge on my ass or something. You know, like. The all caps and the all lower case version of you. Neither one is bulletproof.

Yeah, the one where I agree with them is that like, yeah, I mean, the government is a big mafia, right? And I don't think it's very good, but you know, I recognize the reality that they don't care if I can quote certain things. Like there's no magic spell to make them go away. Pocket constitution. Yeah, yeah. Your pocket constitution spell to make them go away. Pocket constitution. Yeah, yeah, your pocket constitution's

not gonna save you on this stuff. In 1998, Kent filed a document with his local clerk, clerk of court where he claimed to be a sovereign citizen, not a citizen of the corporate government he believed was legally in control. That's not real. It's so not real. That's true, the notary was like, I mean, I'll stamp it, but.

Quote, this in Hovind's eyes severed all ties between Kent Hovind and all caps Kent Hovind. In 2001, nevertheless, he signed Kent E. Hovind above a Kent E. Hovind cap, all caps signature line. So you're not even consistent about your nonsense, Kent. Gotta file a new form. Kent declared he and his wife immune to all previously incurred debts,

including the money they owed to the IRS by revoking their power of attorney with the clerk of courts. They argued that social security was a Ponzi scheme, which covered up the fact that the US government, or in their eyes, the government that ran, corporation or whatever that ran the US government, was bankrupt.

They referred to themselves as natural citizens of America, which is sovereign citizen language that basically means I am a citizen of the literal land, not this fake thing masquerading as a government. Now, that's all pretty standard Sov-Sitt ideology. What's interesting to me is in all the years after he filed this paperwork, he starts to mold his ideology

and begins packaging it in new ways to audiences full of Christians who are just sure they can't legally be required to pay taxes for other people to use the roads, right? Kent's method of justifying this was novel and a lot easier to sell to a wide audience than the kind of arcane sovereign citizen mythology that he buys into. Here's Professor Bronson again. He ultimately rests his belief that he owes no taxes, at least to the extent anything besides bald greed underlies that belief on his status as a Christian and a minister.

He believes that something about being a religious believer makes him different from the vast majority of his fellow citizens. This difference, he believes, is itself sufficient to excuse him from paying taxes. That is, in Hoeven's mind, there is something about the economics of religious practice that materially alters the secular assumptions that underlie the tax law. Hovind's understanding of the difference that frees him from the clutches of the taxation

that his fellow citizens face comprises two parts, one descriptive and one normative. Descriptively, he argues that he is a minister and as a minister, everything he owns belongs to God. Normatively, he argues that he should not be subject to earthly taxation on money he earns doing God's work. And this is, there's still a lot of people who will argue this in different ways.

And they get away with it actually a lot of the time, right? Like churches do a lot of shit they shouldn't be able to do. I was gonna say, if he just hired an accountant, if he hired a real accountant and did a little paperwork, half of that could be true. He could get away with a lot of his tax burden and the IRS wouldn't be willing to fight him on it.

But he's getting greedy. But he just refused to do the paperwork. I think the professor gets it right. He's just too greedy, right? Like he's not, a smarter man would recognize that like, well, I'm a greedy asshole, but my greed has a limit and like, I don't wanna, I know the government can only be pushed so far, right?

Like Jim Baker at least pretended to pay some taxes. He still did go to prison. He still did go to prison. He still did go to prison. And that's by the way where kids stories at it. But Molly, that's all gonna come in part two. Do you have anything to plug here at the end of part one? Oh gosh, I don't really have anything to plug.

I'm on the internet. It sucks on there. Molly's on the internet. We're raising funds again here at Behind the Bastards for the Portland Diaper Bank, which provides diapers for free to people who do not have enough money, but have babies. You can go to GoFundMe Portland Diaper Bank,

Behind the Bastards Portland Diaper Bank GoFundMe, and you will find the new GoFundMe for that, and you can donate money to it, and help out some people who don't have enough money for diapers, which is a good thing. Diapers cost a fortune surprisingly. I just bought some for a friend's baby shower. Yeah.

Like, how are they getting away with this? I don't know, I don't know. I think- Big diaper. Big diaper, yeah, yeah. That's really, that's really, that's the new military industrial complex. After Vietnam, they turned all of that body bag material into diapers and they're just making more money than ever.

That's my conspiracy theory, Molly. And we at Cool Zone Media have a couple of new shows that you should check out. The first is Bar Offline, hosted by Edzitron, once or twice a week. It's a show about the tech industry and tech world and all things happening there. Ed is wonderful.

And we also have a new weekly show hosted by Jamie Loftus called 16th Minute of Fame. It's all about the internet's main characters and what happened to them after they went viral. So check that out. And everything else for CoolZ at Cool Zone Media. Molly, you're at Socialist Dog Mom on Twitter, correct? That's me.

Did I forget anything else, Robert? Did we do all the things? No. Yes. Great. Bye. Go ride a dinosaur. Yeah. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the

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