I don’t know whether it is reassuring or not to see that the candidates in the Republican primaries for the 2000 election contained the same kind of moronic clowns and Taliban fundies as they do today. One of the idiots running back then was Steve Forbes. Yes, that Steve Forbes, the publishing executive and editor-in-chief of business magazine Forbes. He also ran in 1996.
The campaign was not very successful, despite the money Forbes raised (e.g. by selling some of his Forbes Inc. voting shares), but what interests us is his platform. Oh, there were the standard issues: flat tax (really a regressive tax in Forbes’s case) and opposition to most government regulation of the environment, drug legalization, same-sex marriage and the UN, support for school prayers and combatting juvenile crime with “school morality”, and a promise to no longer donate money to Princeton University due to its hiring of philosopher Peter Singer because Singer views personhood as being limited to sentient beings (yeah, Forbes missed the nuances of that issue). One interesting detail about his plan, however, was his platform on education: “More Bible; less evolution”. One might be inclined to think there is a link between that one and the fact that Forbes Magazine has had an annoying tendency to “give equal time” to mindrotting cargo cult science when discussing scientific issues, though the Forbes site is, in fairness, an aggregator site, and Forbes himself probably has somewhat limited control over what gets published there.
Forbes also denied that there were any evidence that CO2causes global warming, which even in 2000 was a pretty stupid position. We are not aware of him changing his mind. Making sure he ticks all the usual wingnut science denial boxes, Forbes has also promoted the usual DDT ban myths, backed up by the usual PRATTs. He is also a member of the board of trustees of the Heritage Foundation.
Diagnosis: His 2000 platform seems at least to be inspired by countries Forbes would never mention as sources of inspiration, and the guy himself seems to have bought into all the standard conspiracy theories and religiously fundamentalist anti-science attitudes that often come with wingnuttery. Still pretty influential in Tea Party circles, it seems.