The vast left wing conspiracy against Expelled has kicked into high gear! Behold the arguments from heretics, like Scientific American! And, um, Fox News!
Scientific American has put together a list of Six Things In Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know. Ominous, right? Most damning, as far as I’m concerned: the film’s selective editing of a passage written by Charles Darwin, in order to suggest that Darwinism is fundamentally responsible for the Holocaust. Via Digg.
The National Center for Science Education has put together a site called Expelled Exposed, with details on the producers’ quasi-ethical interview tactics, and fleshed-out stories on “what really happened to the people [the film claims] were persecuted for their views.” Via Kate Coe.
Fox News gossip columnist/finger-on-the-pulse cultural critic Roger Friedman lashes out at Expelled for being “sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring)” and declares that Stein “is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.” After pausing twice to make fun of Ben Stein’s “whiny” voice, Friedman rails against the release plan for the film, which will put prints in front of “rural and poor” viewers at the expense of the Beverly Hills elite. “If I lived in the Deep South, I’d boycott the filmmakers for thinking of me as this gullible and unsophisticated.” Hint hint, Mississippi!
Above: a nearly eight-minute “trailer” for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, an anti-Darwinism documentary starring and produced by Ben Stein (yes, that Ben Stein). The independently-financed doc will hit theaters in mid-April. According to Variety, Stein and friends have hired Motive Entertainment, the marketing firm behind The Passion of the Christ, who are the go-to guys for projects looking to tap into the elusive but potentially lucrative Christian conservative market.
What’s interesting is how aggressive the film seems to be about appealing to the audience’s latent desire to rebel against the establishment. The trailer focuses on Darwin-defaming scientists and professors who have been “shunned and discredited” for “suggesting that we aren’t merely mud animated by lightning after all.” Stein works hard to paint these guys as outlaws whose ideas are so “dangerous” that a giant conspiracy has sprung up to suppress him, led by insecure bureaucrats like…Richard Dawkins? He even warns the viewer that the very act of watching the film “could land you in a heap of trouble.” Sounds sexy, right?
I assume the hope is that college kids are so eager to embrace anything that has anything to do with saying “fuck you” to authority, that they’ll hop on the intelligent design band wagon just to be contrarian. And who knows…there isn’t any decent music for kids with a hardon for rebellion to get behind these days, maybe they’ll buy the Nixon speechwriter-as-institution smashing rockstar just out of desperation.
