IJʿ

Skip to main content Accessibility

Accredited University Invites Tax Protester, Creationist and Felon, Kent Hovind, to Speak

On April 3, Mississippi State University [MSU] is hosting a guest lecturer who will speak on carbon dating techniques used to determine the age of artifacts. The evening’s invited guest lecturer is none other than Kent Hovind, also known as Dr. Dino or, Inmate Number 06452017.

Hovind is a creation science evangelist nicknamed Dr. Dino for his belief that humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and also for creating a theme park in Florida based on this belief.

He earned the inmate number for refusing to withhold payroll taxes from his Dinosaur Adventure Land staff, destroying records, mail fraud, filing false documents and threatening his investigators. Kent and his wife Jo were found guilty of their crimes in 2006 and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2007. The theme park and additional property was also seized.

Hovind was released in 2015 and welcomed home by his son who carried on their ministry in his absence, fighting the “war against evolution and humanism.” Kent currently resides in Alabama where he is re-opening his theme park in Conecuh County.

MSU’s Society of Creation Sciences is hosting Hovind, who has been roundly rejected by America’s scientific community and received his Ph.D. from an unaccredited Baptist correspondence school. The group is either oblivious to—or unconcerned with—the fact that he has spent time in prison, and is responsible for a host of and bizarre conspiracy theories. Hovind and son believe there is no evidence that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, but say they have heaps of it proving that humans and dinosaurs lived together. Hovind also thinks Egyptians did not build the Great Pyramid in Giza, that microchips and bar codes play an important part in the mark of the beast, that George Bush is a Satanist and that NASA’s space program was created to prepare people for the New World Order.

He is also associated with a number of extremists. This includes sovereign citizens and fellow tax protestors such as Glenn Stoll who has been connected with the Embassy of Heaven and apocalyptic preacher Chuck Baldwin, who defended Hovind on VDARE, captioning Hovind’s picture “White Conservative Preacher in Jail”.

MSU staff was unfamiliar with Hovind when Hatewatch asked about his upcoming lecture,

But Hovind is particularly excited about the opportunity to impart his flawed theories, and has marked the day and time of the lecture on his website with a countdown clock, presumably enthusiastic to save souls and combat the scientifically accepted theory of evolution, which according to him was authored by the devil to “make people good communists” and “make kids go to hell.”

Comments or suggestions? Send them to HWeditor@splcenter.org. Have tips about the far right? Please email: source@splcenter.org. Have documents you want to share? Please visit: /submit-tip-intelligence-project. Follow us on .