Ben Stein and Expelled Suit Up for the Summer Session
Robert Crowther
Even as school is letting out for the summer, Premise Media is working in conjunction with the distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures, to bring Ben Stein back for the summer. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is being made available from June 15th to August 30th for special group screenings at your preferred theater.
Larger groups and multiple groups can be accommodated by contacting the organizers directly.
Screenings will be prepaid and pre-scheduled group events so anyone interested must contact the organizers directly to coordinate your event
Please do NOT contact the theatre directly
For detailed information or to schedule a screening please contact Tripp Thornton, Premise Media EVP-Sales at Trippht@bellsouth.net, 678-546-5580
Considering the problems that dogged the production of Expelled (claims that key Darwinists were tricked into taking part, the ejection of "raving atheist" PZ Myers from a showing, accusations of copyright violation (not really substantiated), release delayed from February to April, (and of course, Ono's lawsuit), it is surprising that the film is even out of the can, let alone that it is #5 in political documentaries.
O'Leary is right, it is amazing that a documentary film has made over $7 million and at the end of May was still showing in almost a hundred theaters. Most documentaries never make it into that many theaters let alone open nationwide on over 1000 screens. As the film goes international, starting in Canada, it will be interesting to see the Darwinists squirm all over again.
Yoko Ono has lost her Manhattan legal battle to block the use of John Lennon's song "Imagine" in a film challenging the theory of evolution.
EMI still has a state level suit in New York against Premise Media for the inclusion of Imagine in Expelled, and no word yet when that might be resolved one way or the other. Premise now looks north with plans to launch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed nationwide in Canada later this month.
John Derbyshire on "Expelled," or How to Review a Movie without Really Trying
Martin Cothran
I have always admired G. K. Chesterton's dictum that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly, but I never appreciated the full scope of its application until reading John Derbyshire's recent review of Ben Stein's "Expelled" at National Review Online.
"What on earth has happened to Ben Stein?" asks Derbyshire. "He and I go a long way back." Are the two close? Are they old pals who have been through a lot together? "No," he says, "I've never met the guy."
But wait. How can this be? How can Derbyshire have forged this bond of friendship with Stein without actually knowing him? "Though I've never met him," he explains, "I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him."
Got it.
In fact, Derbyshire displays an amazing ability, far beyond that of the rest of us, to engage with people and things even though he has had no direct contact with them. Take "Expelled" for example. "So what's going on here with this stupid 'Expelled' movie?" he asks — a question which could have been answered by the simple expedient of actually watching it. A man with Derbyshire's special talent, however, is not hampered by such constraints:
Ronald Bailey Attacks Expelled, Endorses Discrimination Against Intelligent Design Proponents
Casey Luskin
Over at Reason.com, Ronald Bailey has taken the Michael Shermer (i.e. Fact Free) approach to attacking Expelled. Bailey charges that "the film is entirely free of scientific content—no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for 'intelligent design' (ID) theory is given." But last time I saw the film, it featured well-credentialed scientists arguing that natural selection lacks information-generative power and arguing the digitally-encoded information in DNA and highly efficient micromachines and factories in the cell strongly indicate an intelligent cause. Bailey makes the simplistic (and inadequate) argument for neo-Darwinism based upon the fact that the fossil record shows that species have changed over time and younger fossils more closely resemble living species than older fossils. But this argument makes three mistakes:
(1) 2001 car models more closely resemble 2008 car models than do 1922 car models, but no one is arguing that cars evolved without intelligent design;
(2) It ignores that ID does not dispute the notion that species on earth have changed over time, but merely disputes the claim that the main driving force generating all complex biological features is natural selection acting on random mutation; and
(3) It forgets the much bigger problem that Neo-Darwinism has trouble explaining the paucity of intermediate forms in the fossil record;
There are people who apparently have a deep-seated need to believe that Intelligent Design proponents are really creationists in disguise, and that once they have control over the nation's schools, they're going to rip off their clever scientist disguises to reveal men in short sleeve dress shirts and horn-rimmed glasses who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Acting on a preordained set of instructions, this view seems to suggest, they will proceed to outlaw any mention of evolution in schools, and will execute plans that involve, among other things, taking students on weekly field trips to Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
It is a frightening vision of the future: a flood of creationism let loose on the nation's schools. The end of science is near, and to ride out the crisis, ID critics are building themselves a rhetorical ark and bringing the fallacies aboard two by two.
The charge that ID is part of some creationist conspiracy was recently reiterated by Larry Arnhart, the author of Darwinian Conservatism. Arnhart, a professor at Northern Illinois University, writes in a recent post about the "Rhetorical Blunder in Ben Stein's 'Expelled'," a blunder which has to do, he thinks, with what is really behind Intelligent Design.
Stanford's Fair Use Project to Defend Expelled against Yoko Ono's Lawsuit
Robert Crowther
According to a press release just issued, the Fair Use Project of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society has announced that it will defend Premise Media's use in Expelled of a clip from John Lennon's song "Imagine." Yoko Ono, EMI and Columbia have all filed suit against Premise, which has claimed they used the clip under the fair use doctrine.
“The right to quote from copyrighted works in order to criticize them and discuss the views they may represent lies at the heart of the fair use doctrine,” said Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project. “These rights are under attack here, and we plan to defend them.”
You might want to get out and see the film this weekend before some wacky judge slaps an injunction on it.
Expelled Is Not a Film about Intelligent Design, Rather It's about Academic Freedom
Robert Crowther
MSNBC.com columnists sure have it in for Expelled. What about the movie exactly has all their knickers in a twist? It might be easier to ask what doesn’t infuriate them about this film. Last week it was Art Caplan’s ridiculously absurd charge that Ben Stein is a Holocaust denier. This week it is Alan Boyle taking aim at the film, albeit in a less inflammatory manner. At least he, unlike some critics, appears to actually have seen, and reflected on, the movie.
Much more surprising is the sheer flat-out lying done by critics bent on denouncing the movie’s controversial linking of Darwinism and Hitlerism.
Now, I happen to think that the Darwin-Hitler link is pretty darn well established, as I’ve argued on National Review Online, Jewcy, and in this space. The major Hitler biographers agree with me that Hitler in Mein Kampf and elsewhere used transparently Darwinian arguments to motivate fellow Jew-haters to actuate the Final Solution.
I don’t care if somebody insists on disagreeing with my interpretation of the relevant texts – though frankly that would be hard to do if your powers of reading comprehension rise above sixth-grade level. Just please don’t lie in your representation of what I’ve written.
From a press release sent out for the Expelled producers:
Yoko Ono and others have now filed lawsuits challenging the film's use and critique of John Lennon's song Imagine. One of the suits seeks to ban free speech through preliminary injunctive relief which essentially means that they are trying to expel EXPELLED as it is now being shown in theaters. ...
But the irony of this lawsuit was not lost on the film's star Ben Stein, "So Yoko Ono is suing over the brief Constitutionally protected use of a song that wants us to 'Imagine no possessions'? Maybe instead of wasting everyone's time trying to silence a documentary she should give the song to the world for free? After all, 'imagine all the people sharing all the world...You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the World can live as one.'"
Think There Is No Link Between Darwinism and Nazism? Watch This
John West
Those like Arthur Caplan who claim that Nazi ideology did not draw on Darwinism should watch this clip from a 1930s Nazi propaganda film justifying forced sterilization. Near the beginning of the clip the narrator warns that modern society is transgressing against a fundamental law in preserving the unfit. Just what law is he talking about? (Hint: You find it mentioned repeatedly in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.)
Executive Producers of EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed Statement on Lawsuit by Yoko Ono
Robert Crowther
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 23, 2008
Executive Producers of EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed Statement on Lawsuit by Yoko Ono
The fair use doctrine is a well established copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism.
We are disappointed therefore that Yoko Ono and others have decided to challenge our free speech right to comment on the song Imagine in our documentary film.
Based on the fair use doctrine, news commentators and film documentarians regularly use material in the same way we do in EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed .
Premise Media acknowledges that Ms. Yoko Ono did not license the song for use in the Film. Instead, a very small portion of the song was used under the fair use doctrine.
Unbiased viewers of the film will see that the Imagine clip was used as part of a social commentary in the exercise of free speech and freedom of inquiry. Unbiased viewers of the film will also understand that the Imagine clip was used to contrast the messages in the Documentary and that the clip was not used as an endorsement within Expelled.
Is Ben Stein a Holocaust Denier? No, But "Expelled” Star Is Smeared by MSNBC Columnist Anyway
John West
In an over-the-top “review” of the film Expelled, bioethicist and MSNBC columnist Arthur Caplan has made the preposterous claim that Ben Stein is a Holocaust denier. Caplan's so-called review is so inaccurate that one can’t help but wonder whether Caplan even watched the film he denounced. If he did, he obviously didn’t pay attention. For the record, here's a catalog of Caplan’s most egregious errors:
It does not seem that Arthur Caplan, the toast of MSNBC, has even seen the film Expelled, his representations of it are so uninformed. Yet he is prepared to charge in public that Ben Stein is a "Holocaust denier," someone whose name should be forever "a source of scorn."
Would this be same Ben Stein who takes his Expelled audience through Dachau to show them where the Holocaust took place? Some denier!
Is the “Science” of Richard Dawkins Science Fiction?
Robert Crowther
Following closely on the heels of Bruce Gordon, Jonathan Wells --himself a player in Expelled-- has just published a response to Richard Dawkins' recent LA Times opinion piece.
Atheist Richard Dawkins is hopping mad at the makers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Dawkins accuses the filmmakers of “lying for Jesus” because they make it seem that he believes in intelligent design and space aliens.
Dawkins is an outspoken critic of intelligent design (ID). In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins defined biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Design is only an appearance, because (as the subtitle of the book indicated) “the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.” According to Dawkins, evolution shows that the universe and everything in it can be explained by undirected natural processes such as random mutation and survival of the fittest. By ruling out design, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
According to intelligent design, however, it is possible to infer from evidence in nature that some features of the world and of living things are better explained by an intelligent cause than by undirected natural processes. Although ID says nothing about the nature of the designer (other than calling it intelligent), it leaves open the possibility that the designer is God.
Clearly, Darwinian evolution and intelligent design have different implications for God’s existence.
Expelled Posts 3rd Best Opening for A Documentary Ever
Robert Crowther
[Update: A certain Iowa astronomer who shall remain nameless has alertly pointed out that the opening I refer to here was in Ames, not Des Moines.]
Across the country this weekend, people did a rare thing and turned out in droves for a documentary. In Des Moines Ames, Iowa the line to get into Expelled stretched around the block Friday night. In Seattle theaters were crammed with students — on a Saturday afternoon, no less.
Expelled Critics: So Bored They Can't See Straight
Martin Cothran
I saw "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," the controversial new documentary film by Ben Stein on the intelligent design debate, at one of the private screenings that was part of the grassroots marketing for the film, and I was disappointed. That's right. Here I made a trip all the way to Louisville, Kentucky from my home in Danville (almost 2 hours away), I go get a big bag of popcorn and a drink, climb the steps in the stadium seating at the Tinseltown Theater for the private screening and, as it turns out, not a single, solitary Darwinist tried to sneak past the big, scary looking octogenarian security guards to try to get in.
So I watched the movie instead, which was excellent. Now I know why the Darwinists are having such a fit--and spending so much time and effort throwing it: This is a powerful expose of academic intolerance. If this one gets wide exposure, they get a well deserved black eye.
"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is effective in its presentation of its views. It is by turns funny, ominous, clever, illuminating, and entertaining, which is more than you can say about some of the reviews of this movie which are merely hostile. Apparently their strategy is to convince people that the movie is not very good, something they have spilled a lot of ink trying to do.
There are several things the critics are saying to accomplish this apparent objective, some of which have nothing to do with the quality of the movie at all.
The frustration level at The New York Times over Ben Stein’s new documentary Expelledcan be gauged by the tone of its movie “review,” which might be described more accurately as a tantrum. It opens:
One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.
One of the sleaziest documentaries in a very long time? This comes from the same paper that hailed Michael Moore as “a credit to the Republic” and praised his dishonest Fahrenheit 911 as “achieving an eloquence that its most determined critics will have a hard time dismissing.” And it comes from the same movie reviewer who just last month lavished praise on an “endearing” gay sex comedy for “its breezy shots of male genitalia and characters nicknamed Long John and Tripod.”
As I’ve said before, it’s getting really hard to parody the Darwinists. They parody themselves.
But perhaps I should feel sorry for those at the Times, as they obviously had a bad week. The same day the Times blasted Expelled, after all, it reported that its “main source of revenue—newspaper advertising in print and online—fell 10.6 percent, the sharpest drop in memory.” Why am I not surprised?
Expelled Audience in Iowa Gives Standing Ovation to Persecuted Astronomer
John West
The movie theater screening Expelled in the home town of Iowa State University (ISU) apparently couldn't handle all the people who showed up last night, and the audience responded with a standing ovation for ISU astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure by ISU because of his pro-ID views. According to The Ames Tribune,
A line for the 7:10 p.m. premiere showing of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" at the Varsity II theater on Lincoln Way stretched back five storefronts to the Bali Satay House Friday... Those who made it into the theater before it filled up generally responded positively to the film. They greeted the ending credits with applause and, after Gonzalez wrapped up a brief discussion following the film, treated him with a standing ovation.
[Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman just asked me to post this on his behalf:]
Discovery Salutes Expelled
by Bruce Chapman
The producers of Expelled have high hopes as the film opens today.
Practical questions of theater exposures and audience awareness are things that we, as a think tank, cannot assess, of course. But we are cheering the filmmakers on. First signs look positive. The over-the-top attacks of most official reviewers--offended by the film's message, not its quality--may turn out to help in some quarters. These are the exact same reviewers who commonly tell us not to object to offensive Hollywood products, but just to judge a film for its production quality. By now a large share of the population is wise to such hypocritical standards.
Some other things already are clear. Just making a major documentary film on subject so serious--although it is packaged in Ben Stein's unique and uproarious humor--and opening it in so many theaters nationally is a huge achievement. The preview screenings that Premise media conducted around the country brought the story of Darwinism's attack on objective science to the attention of thousands of people who didn't know about it before, let alone understand it. The initial theater run will be followed by small-group screenings, TV and DVDs.
This film is going to be a classic and there is nothing the fulminating opposition can do about it. (In recent days they even resorted to threatening lawsuits, just confirming their growing reputation for ill-liberal spite.)
There is no way that we, for our part, could have persuaded the evangelizing atheists in science--that is, the big guns of Darwinism--to let their true personalities appear in front of a camera so people actually could witness their furious, unreasoning contempt.
Expelled has done that. Hearing and seeing Richard Dawkins criticize the disingenuous and propagandistic approach of the National Center for Science Education (a part of the film the Darwinists simply do not want to acknowledge in public, let alone discuss) was worth it all for me. And that was before Dawkins went on to explain the space alien theory of life's origin that Carl Sagan, Francis Crick and many other Darwinians promote as their own creation story. (This theory is real science, right, Richard? Testable, falsifiable, based on evidence you have researched?)
The film has one moment after another like that. The second time I saw it brought out aspects I had missed in the first. I'll see it in a theater this weekend. Already one can tell that this is a documentary that will be watched for years; it is authentic and path finding.
Almost all the main elements of the struggle in which the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture has been engaged are in this film pulled together in an artful, witty, memorable account. It is a great credit to the writers, editors, Ben Stein of course (who has found, as one does, that defending those under attack is to bring attack on oneself), and most of all the producers--and, most notably, Walt Ruloff.
Oh, if we had been making the film, there would have been even more about the scientific flaws in Darwin's theory and even more about the scientific case for intelligent design. If the filmmakers had been able to wait a few months we would have been able to provide them with some exciting new scientific studies and books to cite. But I have to concede that the resulting film would have been twice as long and probably unusable as a Hollywood feature!
In any case, this is not our film. We didn't come up with the idea and we didn't come up with the money (critics who think we did flatter us!).
Frankly, I not only was skeptical, but also suspicious when I first heard about the film project a couple of years ago. That suspicion was wrong. While it is not our film our fellows are the focus of much of the attention and Ben Stein has electrified his audiences with their story. It is brilliant. And for all this we are grateful. It moves the whole question of "what it means to be human" forward. It opens new doors. And it forces many potential allies who would prefer to avert their eyes to recognize that the fight for academic freedom in science is inevitably their fight, too.
Hitler understood something about Judaism that even many Jews today don’t grasp.
I mention this because you’re soon going to be hearing a lot about a new movie, Expelled, which understands something about Hitler that, in turn, many Jews and non-Jews don’t or don’t want to understand.
Starring comic actor Ben Stein, Expelled is a snarky theatrical documentary about the suppression of American scientists who dissent from Darwinist evolutionary orthodoxy. Controversial stuff. What’s really turning critics apoplectic, though, is the case made in the film that Darwinism inspired the Nazis.
In an illuminating irony, not one but two theatrical documentaries open today that trace the genealogy of the Holocaust back to earlier literary texts. One is Expelled, in which Ben Stein touches upon the use Hitler made of Darwinism. The other documentary is Constantine’s Sword, based on the bestselling book of the same name, by James Carroll.
Carroll tells the history of the Christian churches from the perspective of their countenancing of anti-Semitism. As Carroll argues, it all goes back to “the Jews hatred we so easily detect in the New Testament, and that would flower in anti-Jewish violence.”
Now which of these films do think has been savaged in the liberal press, and which has gotten raves? Clearly, to blame Christianity for Auschwitz is an industry standard in the mainstream media, while considering the role that Darwinism played is simply forbidden.
In previous posts this week, I’ve demonstrated Hitler’s debt to Darwin. The extermination of a supposedly inferior people for purposes of advancing racial hygiene is an idea with roots in Darwin’s Descent of Man. I said yesterday that the only major element in Nazism with no blatant reference point in Darwin’s literary corpus is the hatred of Jews in particular.
Today on the Jewish hipster website Jewcy, however, I uncover the deeper Darwinian logic of Hitler’s Jew-hating obsession. Not, I emphasize, that Darwin himself ever said a word against the Jews.
David Klinghoffer nails the Darwinists’ noisome effort to deny Darwinism’s influence on Nazi ideology in today’s National Review Online. He knocks down the straw man arguments they employ—the pretense that the film is mainly or even substantially about this topic, or that the film blames the bulk of the Nazi enterprise on Darwin or that the film calls today’s Darwinists Nazis. But mainly he simply marshals the historians. (The very best current history, of course, is Darwin to Hitler, by Richard Weikart of Cal State.)
Michael Shermer’s Fact-Free Attack on Expelled Exposes Intolerance of Darwinists towards Pro-Intelligent Design Scientists (Part 3)
Casey Luskin
In Part 1 and Part 2 I discussed how Michael Shermer’s review of Expelled applies one-sided skepticism to anything that challenges Darwinism, withholding skepticism of claims made by pro-evolution sources. When claiming that Richard Sternberg faced no discrimination after sympathizing with Darwin-skeptics, but simply invented a “conspiracy," Shermer failed to scrutinize the blatantly false and contradictory claims by Darwinists trying to cover up what really happened. In that case, Eugenie Scott made private concessions that Sternberg did not do anything mortally wrong in his handling of the publication of Stephen C. Meyer’s paper on intelligent design (ID), and spoke as if Sternberg had been ousted. As I observed, Shermer’s methodology when dealing with the persecution of pro-ID scientists is as follows:
Last night in Dallas the official theater run of Expelled was kicked off with a gala premiere complete with red carpet, film narrator Ben Stein, and the film's main stars, the Expelled scientists. Here's a few pictures. (For full disclosure, I took the crummy one, the others were supplied by an attendee with a camera that far outclassed my phone.)
Click for full size images.
Expelled scientists, Drs. Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, Robert Marks and Discovery's Dr. John West at the world premiere of Expelled.
Drs. Gonzalez, West, and Marks on the red carpet.
Attendees partied before the actual screening of the film.
Some of the attending Expelled scientists being introduced to attendees by the executive producers. (Left to right: Robert Marks, Michael Egnor, Guillermo Gonzalez, Caroline Crocker, Richard Sternberg, Walt Ruloff, John Sullivan and Jeffrey Schwartz.)
Supporters of free speech partied long into the night at Expelled's VIP after party.
Finally, a writer known to me personally to be a smart and honest guy, no ignoramus nor a propagandist, attacks the Hitler-Darwin thesis in Expelled.
Ronald Bailey, who used to write book reviews for me at National Review, comments on the movie in the libertarian magazine Reason. He complains that linking Darwinism with Nazism is the “most egregious part of the film.” He harrumphs that the Expelled filmmakers “overlook the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion.”
OK, but when Muslims today commit mass slaughter in the name of their religion, or when Christians once did so, it becomes reasonable on that basis to ask probing questions about the truth of Islam or Christianity. For that matter, it’s fair to question my own faith, Judaism, for the Hebrew Bible’s countenancing of Joshua’s bloody war against the natives of Canaan.
It would be ridiculous to say that any of this adds up to a slam-dunk argument for rejecting Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Similarly, Hitler’s appropriation of Darwinian language in Mein Kampf is by itself no case for rejecting Darwinism.
Seattle Times Publishes "An Intelligent Discussion about Life"
Anika Smith
Today The Seattle Times is sure to provoke a reaction from Darwinists with an article by Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman, "An Intelligent Discussion about Life."
"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is a trenchant new film by actor/economist Ben Stein, the man first made famous in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." He's now tackling with humorous dudgeon the classic example of ideological science, Darwinian evolution. Stein shows Darwinists insistently misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse.
When I was taught Darwin's theory in college more than four decades ago, it was represented as unassailable. But I also was taught in those days to respect academic freedom, which is a good standard to apply in any field. In the 1990s, before intelligent design was added to the ideas studied at Discovery Institute, I learned about an assault on the academic freedom of Dean Kenyon, a biologist and author at San Francisco State University who had come to view Darwin's theory as flawed. At first, the effort to restrain him from teaching seemed like just another skirmish over political correctness.
Historian R. Weikart On the Valid Way to Understand Darwinism’s Influence on Development of Nazi Ideology
Bruce Chapman
The Darwinists claim that anyone who cites historical works in defense of the proposition that Darwin's theory influenced Nazi ideology is "quote mining." As usual, that is a cover-up. So is the straw man argument that the film Expelled is trying to blame poor old Darwin for the Holocaust or to claim that Darwinism originated anti-Semitism or that Darwinism was the sole source of Nazi ideology. Any such straw man intentionally exaggerates the message of the one segment of Expelled where the Nazi ideology of eugenics and race is explored.
Another straw man is the pretense that the film tries to stigmatize as Nazi-prone any contemporary Darwinist. Not so. The attempt here is to smear the film’s star, Ben Stein, by putting words in his mouth.
And please don’t say that applications that diminish the dignity of the human person merely derive from something separate called “Social Darwinism.” There is no such significant distinction in the actual history of Darwinism, at least not in Europe. Social Darwinism, especially in Germany, was the dogma of evolutionism applied to public issues.
This article by German history scholar Richard Weikart of Cal State should set any fair-minded person straight. That person then should repair to the wealth of primary and secondary sources Weikart cites in his book, From Darwin to Hitler.
Oh, yes, what was that secondary title for On the Origin of Species again? As David Berlinski, author of the new book from Random House, The Devil’s Delusion, reminded his audience at Benaroya Hall in Seattle last night, it was “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”
Michael Shermer’s Fact-Free Attack on Expelled Exposes Intolerance of Darwinists towards Pro-Intelligent Design Scientists (Part 2)
Casey Luskin
In part 1 I observed that the famous skeptic Michael Shermer’s attack upon the movie Expelled over at Scientific American adopts the following approach when denying the persecution experienced by intelligent design (ID) proponents:
(1) Ignore all the facts showing there was persecution;
(2) E-mail the persecutor and ask them if there was any anti-ID discrimination;
(3) Withhold all skepticism from the statements of the persecutors, and then trumpet their response as evidence that there is no persecution against ID proponents, blaming the victim for losing their job and then claiming those who feel there is persecution are just promoting a “conspiracy.”
Shermer Blames-the-Victim Case #1: Richard Sternberg
The conversation with Michael Shermer in the Expelled film revolves around the publication of Stephen C. Meyer’s pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific paper in the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The editor who oversaw the publication of that article was Dr. Richard Sternberg, who, according to investigations by both the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and also by subcommittee staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, was subsequently was harassed, intimidated, and demoted because he broke ranks with the unwritten (or sometimes written) rule among Darwinists that you must keep ID out of science journals.
It has become the main angle of attack against Expelled to express outrage at the film’s linking of Darwinism with Hitlerism. We need to look today at what Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf.
Thus, London’s Guardian newspaper publishes a hit piece on Expelled by Adam Rutherford of Nature magazine. He hasn’t seen the movie but believes gentlemen like P.Z. Myers who “indicate that Expelled suggests the Holocaust was a direct result of Darwinian thought.” That’s not what the film suggests, but n
Even as school is letting out for the summer, Premise Media is working in conjunction with the distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures, to bring Ben Stein back for the summer. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is being made available from June 15th to August 30th for special group screenings at your preferred theater. 
