Climate Denial Crock of the Week

I reported here recently on research showing that climate deniers are more likely to be conspiracy nut jobs. Here’s another video example, as if one was needed.

Bryan Fischer, someone you may not have heard of, but who is a big deal on talk radio in the bible-belt heartland, is not only a climate denier and a creationist crank, but also denies the fundamentals of causation behind the AIDS epidemic. Watch the clip above and count the parallels in AIDS science denial vs climate science denial.

Fischer’s position is that Climate science is a conspiracy by the science literate population (Rick Santorum’s “smart people”) to loot the treasury and impose some kind of clean air tyranny, and concurrently that AIDS is caused by gay behavior and drug use and the government is conspiring to impose some kind of gay agenda on the US .

Fischer is influential in Tea Party and far-right circles.
In other words, he fits right into the mainstream of the modern climate denial/antiscience movement.

Southern Poverty Law Center – HateWatch:

It’s tempting to describe American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer as a close-minded, reactionary bigot. But when it comes to embracing fresh ideas that support his beliefs – heck, he pretty much outdoes us all.

Remember when he said that gays were responsible for the Holocaust? Or the time he claimed that states can require public officials to pass religious tests, directly contradicting both a 50-year-old Supreme Court decision and the express wishes of the Founding Fathers themselves? These are not exactly mainstream theories, but, ever open-minded, Fischer adopted them anyway.

And just when you think he’s reached the outermost limits of revisionism, Fischer one-ups himself by promoting a theory so breathtakingly outrageous that it makes his previous claims seem tame.

Well, he’s done it again, declaring during an anti-gay tirade on his radio show Tuesday that there is no connection between the HIV virus and AIDS.

He even had someone to back him up: Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley whose hypothesis about AIDS has made him a pariah among his peers.

The New Yorker:

Fischer, who hosts “Focal Point,” a popular Christian radio talk show, is one of the country’s most vocal opponents of what he calls “the homosexual-rights movement.” As he puts it, “A rational culture that cares about its people will, in fact, discriminate against adultery, pedophilia, rape, bestiality, and, yes, homosexual behavior.” His goal is to make this view the official stance of the Republican Party. In April, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, hired an openly gay man, Richard Grenell, to serve as his campaign’s national-security spokesman. The next day, Fischer launched a public attack on Grenell, a Republican foreign-policy expert. After other conservative pundits took up Fischer’s cause, Grenell resigned from the Romney campaign. The resulting controversy helped make gay rights one of the defining social issues of the 2012 campaign.

Hear him go ad-nauseum thru the canon of climate crocks below.