Originally published on Forbes.com.
Last week I interviewed Kent Hovind a/k/a Doctor Dino. Doctor Hovind, as I sometimes refer to him, much to the chagrin of some of his critics, is one of the leading lights in the probably oxymoronic field of “creation science”. An assumption that the Bible, in Doctor Hovind’s case the King James Version, is the inerrant word of God combined with a hyper-literal reading will lead one to the conclusion that our world, the whole physical universe actually, is about 6,000 years old.
That position is sometime called Young Earth Creationism – YEC. “Creation scientists” tend to account for the evidence for an older earth by referring to the Flood, although there are some more entertaining theories, like God planting physical evidence contrary to Scripture to test our faith.
Dammit Jim, I’m a tax blogger, not a theologian, biblical scholar, geologist or biologist, so I pretty well stuck to Doctor Hovind’s tax issues which are also rather interesting. Kent’s tax problems arise out of his “ministry”, Creation Science Evangelism which handled distribution of his videos and operation of a theme park called Dinosaur Adventureland. (One of the implications of YEC is that human beings and dinosaurs must have been running around at the same time).
You can get the details in other posts. Suffice it to say that the way he ran CSE got Kent Hovind into a heap of trouble. He has very large deficiencies that have been confirmed by the Tax Court and the Eleventh Circuit, mainly because the CSE income was attributed to him. Then there are the criminal issues.
t Is Not Easy Being Kent Hovind
Kent is finishing up nearly a decade in federal prison having been convicted on charges of not filing payroll returns for CSE, interfering with the administration of the Internal Revenue Code and structuring (systematically withdrawing amounts slightly under $10,000 to avoid currency reporting requirements). He is currently in the Santa Rosa County Jail as he prepares for a trial on a new charge relating to the filing of a lis pendens on property that the Government seized from the ministry.
The Interview
Doctor Hovind has given numerous interviews in something of a campaign to raise public awareness of the injustice that he perceives in the IRS pursuit of his civil liability, his previous criminal conviction and his current prosecution. Most of the interviewers are supportive to a fault of his claims.
I tried to be a bit more challenging. There are two claims that Kent Hovind makes that are, to be charitable, somewhat disingenuous. Those are that he has paid every tax that he owes and that he is not a tax protester. Accepting that at face value, his latest supporters maintain that we have a case of Christian persecution going on here. Ironically, those closest to Doctor Hovind, Ernie Land, his old friend and trusted adviser and Eric Hovind, his son who is carrying the torch, admit that the IRS targeting of Kent is all about taxes, not dinosaurs.
I don’t know if you have an hour of lifespan to spare on the interview, but here it is. There are a couple of gaps, in which an obnoxious recording by the jail was edited out. I’ll save further comments until you have had a chance to listen to as much as you would like.
Godwin’s Rule
My encounter with Doctor Hovind was not meant to be a debate. Rather it was meant to be an interview that did not consist entirely of softballs. Nonetheless, if you want to view it as a debate, then under Godwin’s Rule, I win at 3:04. “How many people won in Hitler’s courts?” is his response to my question about the Tax Court decision confirmed by the 11th Circuit. There are several other Hitler/Holocaust references scattered through the rest of the interview.
Gish Gallop
“Who is this IRS? Is this the 1933 organization incorporated in Delaware that is actually a Puerto Rican collection company?” occurs around 6:00. Hovind’s critics accuse him of using a debate technique known as the Gish Gallop
The Gish Gallop is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that their opponent cannot possibly answer or address each one in real time. More often than not, these myriad arguments are full of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments — the only condition is that there be many of them, not that they be particularly compelling on their own. They may be escape hatches or “gotcha” arguments that are specifically designed to be brief, but take a long time to unravel. Thus, galloping is frequently used in timed debates (especially by creationists) to overwhelm one’s opponent.
Like the Nazi allusions, I just let attempts to start the Gish Gallop pass. I’m going to have to track down what is behind the “Puerto Rican collection company” argument one of these days.
My Favorite Sections
If you don’t want to listen to the whole interview check out the Glenn Stoll discussion around 12:00 and the discussion starting around 27:00 about how the Catholic church is taxed.
The big news starts around 47:40. Hovind wants Congress to investigate his case. His latest group of supporters are well to the right of the Tea Party, but the most prominent of them, Reverend Wiley Drake, who was Second Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention (The second largest Christian denomination in the United States) can probably get attention from prominent people closer to the mainstream. I asked Kent if there are Congressmen who have expressed an interest in his case. He said that there are several, but they want to remain anonymous. Perhaps big news is a bit of an exaggeration. If Pastor Drake did get on the phone with a Congressman, which is quite plausible, he would not be just blown off. He would get enough encouragement to be able to report back to Kent that there was interest.
Too Late For A Happy Ending?
The Hovindication movement has gained enough steam to attract a left wing attack in this Raw Story piece titled The next right-wing folk hero? A tax-dodging creationist who thinks demons pilot UFOs. The happy ending I am hoping for is that Kent would renounce his tax protesting ways and he would get out of the current charges with no additional time. That would turn this into a pretty boring story, which would be a good thing all around, except for my blog traffic. I have been covering Kent Hovind for over two years. During that time there have been at least four tax related court decisions, putting the story firmly in my beat. Much as I long for one of my tax obsessions to break out of the tax ghetto possibly enabling me to be the first tax blogger to give up his day job, I don’t want it to be this one, since it threatens to be ugly and dangerous.
About The Interview
An initial version of the interview went up with a bit over a minute of my answer to one of Kent’s questions missing around 35:00. Kent had commented on the tax code being so complicated that ten CPAs doing the return of a businessman would come up with ten different answers. My answer was that if the return had enough moving parts, that might be likely, but that we would be able to reconcile the differences. The editors had cut out an obnoxious recording saying that the phone call was with an inmate at the Santa Rosa County Jail, which accounts for a couple of the other blank spaces. I need to mention that because of a rumor that I am disappointed to say is entirely unfounded.
The rumor is that the interview was going to be cut down to two minutes and run on CNN prompting a call for the entire interview to be posted. The latter was actually the plan all along and I never had any contact with CNN. With that said, I really would not mind if people started contacting CNN to ask when Pete Reilly’s Kent Hovind interview is going to run. What would be really cool would be to hear from my possible cousin Bill who is on Fox. He poached a clip from my Jill Stein interview without giving any credit to me or Interlock Media.
Like my Jill Stein interview, this inteview will also be cut down into a number of topically based shorter sequences. Also like my Jill Stein interview and the soon to be released interview with Ernie Land, it was professionally produced, although on a shoe string budget entirely funded by a notorious cheapskate. I’m the cheapskate, of course. The production is the work of documentary film maker Jonathan Schwartz of Interlock Media. Among his credits are Turned Out and Faith in the Big House so he is far from a jail house interview virgin. His current project concerns the feminist icon Margaret Fuller.
One little note that I can’t resist adding. The studio where I was filmed was in Newton Mass and there were a variety of available backdrops. Sadly Worcester Mass was not among them, but there were several Boston backdrops available. You will note that I chose one with the iconic Citgo sign on your right.