Quite possibly the best Ben Stein beatdown I've yet read

If it weren't enough for this moon-faced git to have ended up one of Olbermann's Worst People in the World, try this on for size. No one has quite dissected what a deeply immoral, cretinous piece of lying filth Ben Stein is like Jeff Dorchen. Beauty.

That a man, let alone a Jew, could, without shame, walk on the graves of Holocaust victims and claim the theory of evolution was at fault, let alone a man whose nationalism, social darwinism (which is not Darwinism, by the way), anti-intellectualism, and disregard for the truth are beyond doubt - it's like some ghastly executioner's joke.

True dat.

The latest brilliant observation from Ben Stein and Dan Marvin

You learn something every day if you pay attention to the courageous freedom fighters for creationism. For instance, did you know the reason people pursue higher education and become teachers and academicians? It's because they're frightened people. Really, it's true! Okay...it's not really true. But Ben Stein says it, and it flatters creationists' sense of victimhood and anti-intellectual smugness, so that makes it better than true. Because it doesn't matter if something's really true or not. If the creationists want it to be true badly enough, then it will be, and wanting things is so much easier than actually doing the hard work to earn them. For one thing, if you actually do hard work, you might find out what you want to be true isn't really true after all. And that would be bad. So don't waste your life actually learning things. Just believe, and leave the hard work to those pitiful academics. After all, they're frightened people.

She's done it

If Expelled achieves anything, it will be to make millions of Beatles fans Yoko Ono supporters for the first time in their lives. You just don't steal music.

This is why we call them IDiots, gang.

Another Expelled victim: Could Ben Stein's lies launch a wave of religious hate?

Over at Richard Dawkins' site, Dawkins posts a crazed, histrionic letter from a Jewish man to Michael Shermer. This fellow evidently saw Expelled over the weekend, swallowed the movie's foul calumnies about evolutionary theory being responsible for the Holocaust with complete credulity, and went berserk. Dawkins publishes his own calm and even-tempered response to the man (who wails that Shermer ought to be run out of the country, a point which Dawkins admonishes the man is shamefully just like the views the Nazis held towards the Jews), in which he makes the facts abundantly clear and assures the man he has been most callously and cold-heartedly lied to by evil, mendacious people with an agenda. It will be interesting to hear if the man replies, or tucks his tail between his legs and runs off.

This is something that has, perhaps, not been fully addressed in the runup to Expelled's mild opening weekend, but which perhaps should be addressed now: the possibility that certain individuals will take the movie's lies to heart and a wave of flat-out religious hatred towards the sciences and academia may begin. We already know that religious extremists don't need a whole lot of motivation to go completely unglued. Fundamentalists are, by definition, fearful and irrational. It hasn't taken much to inspire the God-soaked to pick up a rifle and gun down an abortion provider, or to beat gay men to death, or to dress up in white robes and lynch black people, or crash jetliners into buildings. Those, of course, are the very worst examples. Right now we have scientists getting hate mail. Is there a chance we might see a Molotov cocktail or two lobbed through the window of a university classroom somewhere?

Hopefully that's just slippery slope thinking. But then, as history teaches us, the more fanatical the belief in the divine, the more dangerous a person is apt to be. And remember, those Wehrmacht belt buckles didn't have Darwin fish on them; they read, very clearly, "Gott Mit Uns." I hope it doesn't turn out that Ben Stein ends up having far more to answer for than just stolen animations and music. Shame on you, Ben. What you've done is deeply immoral and unforgivable.

Talking to a victim of Expelled

Some of our Christian commenters are just idiots or mean-spirited trolls, but occasionally we get someone who's sincere and easily duped by the lies spewed by Ben Stein's little movie. One of these, a young woman (I assume) calling herself Verity, has commented here, and my comment, straightening out a number of the falsehoods and misconceptions she holds as a result of taking Stein at his word, follows right away.

While I have no sympathy for the fundie fanatics of the world, for the people who concoct the lies Expelled is selling to begin with, I do have sympathy for the victims of their deception, and how their view of the world is thus impoverished by trusting in ignorant ideologues like Stein, rather than in reality. Go have a look see, and comment yourself if you see any details I might have missed.

Meanwhile, the weekend estimate for Expelled is shaping up to place the movie at 9th overall, with earnings of around $3,153,000. Its per-screen average of $2,997 means that it was getting about 111 viewers a day on each of its 1,052 screens. Of course, distribution will not be even, so that means some showings each day were nearly empty while others would have been fuller. But mostly this means that Expelled had a thoroughly average opening weekend, actually a bit above average due to its being a propaganda film "documentary." But a far cry, I'd have to say, from the projected $12-15 million that Mark Mathis said was the opening he'd consider "successful." I suspect that on Monday, however, he'll have downgraded his expectations accordingly and be raving about what a blowout success the movie was.

Mostly, though, I think we can consider Expelled pretty much a blip on the "culture war" radar at this point. Hopefully now that they're done being vilified as Nazis, all of America's hard-working and underpaid scientists can get back to work now. You've earned it, gang.

Why yes, the bad reviews are all part of the [echo]Conspiracy-iracy-cy![/echo]

Via Expelled's site:

“Big Science Academy” is proud to have the support of the “Mainstream Press” in stifling the rise of freedom of speech in our science classrooms. In so many ways, “Big Science” and “Big Media” are on exactly the same page, when it comes to making sure that dissenters and troublemakers are properly expelled.

Well, what can I say? It's been a busy week for us here at the Nazi Darwinist Conspiracy Headquarters (I could tell you our secret handshake and door-knock, but then I'd have to expel you) over at Area 51. I myself have had to wash and wax half a dozen black helicopters all by myself! That hasn't left me much time to suppress anyone, but Obergrüppenführer Dawkins tells me he'll let me have some overtime on Tuesday.

There Will Be Blood: The critics have at Expelled

As happens with all shitty movies, the distributor for Expelled declined to screen the movie in advance for critics. Indeed, we know they kept their advance screenings a tightly controlled series of fundie lovefests, expelling any knowledgeable, scientifically literate viewer if they were able. After all, in a movie that beats the "free speech" and "academic freedom" drums long and loud, it's certainly very important to keep opposing views silent, eh?

But now real movie reviewers are getting a chance to eyeball the film, and the results aren't pretty. It will be interesting to hear how Stein and Mathis and their usual gang of idiots try to spin this as the expected reaction from a liberal Darwinist cabal hostile to competing ideas, considering that these are just movie reviewers who are going to see the film as part of their weekly roster along with everything else. They really can't be said to have a horse in the creation-vs-evolution race. Which is also true about most people who don't make the atheist/science/Christian/creationist blogosphere part of their daily routine. And the movie's emotional caterwauling is unlikely to sway or even interest them. There's such a thing as overkill, and even unsophisticated audiences will recoil if they think they're being beaten over the head.

Expelled is currently tracking at 9% on Rotten Tomatoes. By comparison, here is the critical scorecard for the works of self-proclaimed genius auteur Uwe Boll: House of the Dead: 4%. Alone in the Dark: 1%. Bloodrayne: 4%. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale: 5%.

Thus I'd like to offer Nathan Frankowski my congratulations on being able to boast that he is a more critically acclaimed director than Uwe Boll.

I've posted some choice reviewers' quotations in the sidebar. Now it will be entertaining to see how the opening weekend pans out. Since Premise Media actually managed to get the thing on over 1000 screens, the heat is on far more crucially than if they'd opened in limited release and then done a regional release pattern throughout the rest of the summer. If they don't score huge numbers this weekend, they're losing their shirts in a way they would not have if they'd just hit smaller markets in 50-100 screen rollouts in succession. Executive producer Walt Roloff perhaps got overly excited at the prospect of being able to boast the widest release ever for a "documentary." But I think he's just a teensy bit optimistic when he goes on to cheer that he thinks Expelled's numbers could exceed the $23.9 million opening weekend of Fahrenheit 9/11. After all, that movie had colossal pre-release hype going for it. Plus Michael Moore was feeding off a zeitgeist. And despite Roloff's apparent beliefs to the contrary, there isn't this groundswell of public outrage over some conspiracy theory about "Big Science" and its suppression of ID as there was in 2004 over the depredations of the Bush administration.

I must say, it will be interesting to sift through the rubble on Monday.

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Amusingly, RT has logged a second positive review for the movie (against 20 pans), and this one is from Christianity Today, which you'd expect to be receptive. Yet even they admit the movie is scientifically empty: "...if you're looking for ammo to argue your Darwinist friends under the table, look elsewhere."

Home of the Cuttlefish Fan Club

PZ's regular readers may be acquainted with the poetry of commenter "Cuttlefish, OM", whose own blog is chock full of his witty, satirical rhymes. As prose, and not poetry, is my own literary background, I can't tell you why I love his stuff in a way that will earn me an A+ and a smileyface sticker from my Analyzing Poetry professor. I'll just say, the man has flow. Here's his latest masterpiece, about a certain ex-Nixon-speechwriter turned conspiracy theorist.

I am the very model of a devious creationist
I've made a film that's best described as stolen-animationist
I know the use of rhetoric when facts are unavailable
To render the impossible into the unassailable

I'm very well acquainted, too, with data manufacturing
I'll claim I stand on solid granite even as it's fracturing
I document complexity, like when it's irreducible...
And think my movie's in the league of Arthur Miller's Crucible

And think my movie's in the league of Arthur Miller's Crucible
And think my movie's in the league of Arthur Miller's Crucible
And think my movie's in the league of Arthur Miller's Crucible

I'm very good at lying, both the verbal and statistical—
Like Darwin in his later years, I'm openly theistical
In short, you might describe me as a mental masturbationist
I am the very model of a devious creationist

I believe we need to assign Cuttlefish his very own heroic theme song. Possibly that old R.E.M. tune. "Iamb, iamb, iamb Superman..." (Of course, unlike the Expelled producers, we better make sure we secure the proper music rights first.)

(Okay, start the flames over my lousy pun in the comments whenever you're ready...)

F*ck Expelled. I'm done with it.

Okay, here's my 'tude at the moment. I figure I've done my bit, said all I had to say, voiced my opinion in several forums: here, in the comments of other blogs, even at the movie's IMDb page. As far as I can tell there's nothing more needs be said. Those of us on the pro-science side know full well by now that the movie is a pack of disgraceful, meretricious lies. And any criticism of it whatsoever simply gives the producers another opportunity go into Monty Python mode all over again and wail, "Help, help, we're being repressed!" (Another irony-meter breaker, since one of the movie's major false claims is that science will tolerate no criticisms of its theories.) The movie is selling a persecution fantasy and a conspiracy theory, nothing more. It whines about scientific "thought police" while never once bothering to argue a scientific case for ID. Thus its dishonesty ought to be laid bare for anyone who isn't already an ignorant, uneducated ideologue or deluded fundamentalist tool.

So I'm done talking about it. I will, of course, leave the link to Expelled Exposed up in the sidebar, pretty much in perpetuity. The NCSE's fact-checking site has, thanks to the efforts the pro-science blogosphere, finally bounced onto the first page of Google search results for "expelled." The site's a first rate takedown of all the movie's lies, and right now it's gotten so much traffic its server has been overwhelmed, a problem I'm sure they'll remedy ASAP. If you encounter any creationist nitwits who seem to think the movie is something to gloat over, forward them on to Expelled Exposed. And if they refuse to read it, just taunt them with, "Now who's scared to have their beliefs challenged?"

I suspect that, Monday night, I'll go have a look at the weekend actuals over at Box Office Mojo to see how the thing did, and write one more post as a result at that time. The producers are still claiming they're rolling out on over 1000 screens, which I still doubt.*

But whatever their release pattern, I predict that Friday/Saturday could be pretty decent for them (as The Choir will all go see it then), after which point it will peter out. Amusingly, Mark Mathis has been quoted as saying he anticipates an opening in the $12-15 million range, a laughably unrealistic boast, as such A-list superstars as George Clooney and Keanu Reeves have recently struggled to squeak out $12 million opening weekends for their recent releases. And Expelled is only one of many releases this Friday, all of which are going up against the new Judd Apatow comedy. That's going to annihilate everything else at the box office in its path.

But then, when has Expelled ever been anything other than laughably unrealistic? Okay, so the movie will resonate with a built-in core audience of scientifically illiterate fundies who respond easily when their emotional hot buttons are pushed. It may even spark some testy debate for a while. But whether it succeeds or fails, remember, Expelled will not change two things. 1) Intelligent design is still not science, and 2) all life evolved and continues to evolve, and will go on evolving long after Christianity, and even homo sapiens ourselves, have gone extinct.

As far as my own posting about Expelled on this blog is concerned, well, that's a wrap.

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*Box Office Mojo in fact reports 1052 screens, which is insanely ambitious for any independent film. They could very well take a huge bath on this, but at this point I suspect they don't care, as they've already stirred up enough hostile and mocking reaction to crank their persecution complexes into overdrive.

NCSE's "Expelled Exposed" site now live

Up to now, Expelled Exposed has just been a collection of links to some pre-release reviews and blog posts about the upcoming Ben Stein festival of propaganda and lies. Now the work on the full site is done, and it contains a complete fisking of the film, all the way from its outrageous claims of a link between Darwin and Nazi eugenics, to revealing the real circumstances behind what happened to all the ID "martyrs" the movie wants you to believe were "expelled" by the Evil Darwinist Conspiracy (presumably on orders from Obergrüppenfuhrer "Blofeld" Dawkins hisownself) for daring to promote the "taboo" idea of intelligent design. And as a nice little poke in the eye, the site also features the story of someone who really was expelled: Chris Comer, who, as you will recall, was forced out of her job at the Texas Education Association for simply sending out an FYI email about the talk given here in Austin last November by Barbara Forrest.

In all, this is a vital resource to counter the despicable lies this movie is spreading.

Some people might remark that those of us in the atheist/pro-science blogosphere are making too much hay about this movie, that we are simply giving them the promotion and attention they want.

It would be nice if we lived in a utopian world where all we had to do to make the bad people go away was not think about them. But we don't live in that world, and you know the old line about evil triumphing because good men do nothing. Well, that applies here. As Scientific American and PZ have all pointed out, this is not merely a shitty movie, but a moral outrage, made in a spirit not simply of old fashioned creationist stupidity but outright malice. If it were just a case of some idiot making a creationist film full of silly bullshit that we could laugh at, then we'd just laugh at it and have done with the whole thing. But this movie slanders science itself, and tries to paint the purveyors of scientifically empty nonsense as unappreciated geniuses and oppressed martyrs at the mercy of an imaginary supervillain. The Moron Brigade may eat this up, but in order to reach the intelligent folks who are simply sitting on the fence, the film's evil — hell, I'll say it, why not, that's what it is — must be confronted straight up.

So far, all the publicity that matters (that is, what's appeared in the mainstream media, rather than fundie websites) about this farce has been uniformly negative, which is a good sign. It hasn't gotten — and will not get — a single favorable review from anyone who is not already a committed right-wing, fundamentalist, creationist ideologue. Now it's up to the folks who truly love and support science, knowledge, honesty, truth, and morality to keep up the heat on this disgrace, and send it down in flames where it belongs once and for all.

(And don't forget to link to Expelled Exposed in your own blogs, every time you discuss Expelled in any capacity, in order to drive the site's Google ranking higher.)

I'm convinced now!

Want to see what kind of person Ben Stein and Mark Mathis are catering to with Expelled? Check this comment. With such powerful arguments to offer, how could we not have seen the light before now?

Word of the Year: "Manufactroversy"

Valerie Tarico modestly admits to not having invented it, but it's a brilliant neologism that I'm sure will gain new cachet within the reality based community, now that it's been used to mock the intelligent design crowd in general and the claims of Expelled in particular. Tarico writes the latest derisive smackdown review of Ben Stein's folly over at HuffPo, and she takes the gloves off right away.

Now the creationists have taken a new approach that they hope will help them achieve their goal of teaching religious beliefs in our schools as science. That approach can be summed up in one simple word: whining.

One week from today, the new movie, Expelled, attempts to turn creationist complaints into mainstream media. Featuring Ben Stein, one of the conservative right's biggest whiners, the film makes several plaintive appeals: There's a conspiracy among big government and big science, and it's not fair! All we ask is for our perspective to get equal time! (Read: we lost, so let's split the prize.) All we want is for teachers to "teach the controversy"! This is all about academic freedom. Americans like freedom, right?....

The proponents of intelligent design can't gain credibility among hard scientists because their evidence is pathetic. So what do they do? Follow in the footsteps of the tobacco and oil companies and spend millions in an effort to create public doubt. They plea for their side to be told, they imagine vast conspiracies and they cry out for fair play, but the reality is much simpler.

The hits just keep coming.

Expelled: agitprop not even Fox News can love

You'd think if Expelled could find a receptive outlet in the mass media to promote its lies, it would be the fine folks at the Bush Administration Ministry of Propaganda. But even Roger Ailes' network, that brought us Sean Hannity and John Gibson, let alone Bill Orally, isn't benighted enough to swallow Ben Stein's anti-science spooge.

What the producers of this film would love, love, love is a controversy. That’s because it’s being marketed by the same people who brought us "The Passion of the Christ." They’re hoping someone will latch onto an anti-Semitism theme here since there’s a visit to a concentration camp and the raised idea — apparently typical of the intelligent design community — that somehow the theory of evolution is so evil that it caused the Holocaust. Alas, this is such a warped premise that no one’s biting.

It's looking more and more like Expelled will be to documentaries what Howard the Duck was to Hollywood special effects blockbusters.

UK's Guardian flunks Expelled

Haven't been blogging for many days, mainly because of being busy, but also because there's been little to report that hasn't been covered very extensively elsewhere in the atheist blogosphere, and Austin's been pretty quiet. Also, what else is there to say about the train wreck that is Expelled? Every day these people reveal themselves to be a little more reprehensible than they already were. My mind reels at the thought of what it would be like to be the kind of person whose life has been so completely swallowed up by the endless stream of lies required to shore up a creaking, desperate ideology. I think of what it must be like to be Ben Stein and Mark Mathis, and, if I believed in souls, I figure I know what it would be like to sell yours to Mammon. Sure, these guys have probably got the Benjamins. But to do so at the cost of all fundamental human decency is just depressing.

The UK paper The Guardian has now weighed in on Expelled (at least the bit of it that's been previewed online) in a snarktastic little dig at that pompous fool Ben Stein. It's a fun morning read.

From the parts I've seen - the first 10 minutes online - it seems to deploy all the loaded-dice arguments, the overdog's deep-seated sense of victimhood and conventional rightwing hysteria. Stein lambasts academe for dismissing the work of "ID scientists", even when they are bankrolled by the rancid likes of the Discovery Institute, a think-tank inseminated yearly with funds from California savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson Jr, who in 1985 told the Orange County Register: "My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives." Man, I can't wait for that, Ben, the priests running everything and we live like it's Ireland in the 1940s. Par-tay!

Heh. But otherwise, yeah, not much new under the sun. The movie is still a dishonest piece of shit, and the people promoting it are still dishonest pieces of shit. That's creationism for you. [Cue Thompson Twins] Lies, lies, lies, yeah....

Thanks, Eugenie!

Following up my post about the Facebook group "Protest Ben Stein's Expelled", I got this blush-inducing celebrity endorsement from no less than Eugenie Scott!

Martin Wagner, you have your head on very, very straight.

If we raise a fuss for Expelled, we increase the publicity and the gate. We play directly into their frame.

Why would we want to do that?

Okay, take a minute to chuckle at the visual of me putting on my "aw shucks" face. Anyway, Eugenie goes on to point out that while Expelled is sure to be a huge hit in "church basements," — har! — the general public isn't exactly awaiting it with bated breath the way they are, say, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Launching some massive protest campaign against the movie will simply play into their hands by validating their false message that "Big Science" wants to shut down open debate. She goes on to recommend the NCSE's newly launched site Expelled Exposed. It's new and fairly spartan at the moment, but it's been launched both as a one-stop shop for all of the news surrounding the movie's release and publicity (such as the PZ fiasco), and will go on to be a resource for refuting the false claims in the movie itself. Go on over and bookmark it.

Incidentally, if you're a member of the Facebook group, you'll see that one guy who's responded, one Barrett Cune, is doing a great job making my case for me, by presenting himself as exactly the kind of histrionic assclown we don't want responding to the movie. In a couple of ALL CAPS harangues, he wails about the need to "hit the streets" and attacks imaginary people who "just want to whine about the Earth and her problems.. you dont actually want to do anything to help.. you want your fucking parents to do it for you." If old Barrett can't tell the difference between coming up with ways to counter the movie effectively and productively, and thinking no one wants to do anything simply because we think parading the streets like some kind of I.R.A. rally would backfire, he clearly needs to grow the fuck up. I can understand and sympathize with his passion, but not his immaturity. The idea is that we're smarter and more rational than the IDiots who do things like make movies comparing scientists to Hitler as a way of concealing the fact they have no science backing up their own position. Acting even stupider than they do is not how to turn the generally indifferent public off to their message.

Picket Expelled? No no no no no!

I just got an invitation in my email to join a Facebook group called "Protest Ben Stein's Expelled," which lists PZ Myers as one of two admins. The thrust here is to organize protests in front of theaters wherever it's playing. I joined right away, mainly so I could stop these folks — whose motivations I am, of course, 200% in sympathy with — from what could be a foolish mistake. I promptly posted a bulletin to the group, which I will reproduce in full below. There's a right way and a wrong way to oppose a folly like Expelled, and picketing theaters is the wrong way.

I think picketing theaters is a bad idea. Why? Because it will only serve to draw attention to the movie and might make people curious where they were indifferent before. Nothing sells tickets like controversy, and by organizing theater protests, we who oppose this pack of lies may unwittingly help give it more business.

Remember what happened with Passion of the Christ? This was Mel Gibson's small independent movie, until the Anti-Defamation League began making a big stink in the media about the possibility it might be anti-Semitic, and complaining Gibson would not screen the film for them. The media ran with that, with the result that so many people became fascinated and curious that the movie ended up taking in over $375 million in its theatrical run.

I don't think we want to make the same mistake in dealing with Expelled.

Instead, how about contacting your local media (newspapers, TV, radio) if the movie's coming to your town, and offer to either write a guest editorial detailing the specific lies in the movie, as well as the long campaign of dishonesty being used to promote it? Or ask to talk to their staff movie critic, and provide him with correct information to counter the film's falsehoods that he can then include in his review.

Picketing theaters may even feed into the movie's false message that "Big Science" and its supporters merely want to shut down dissenting views. When in fact, that's what the producers of Expelled are doing!

This movie isn't poised to become some big megahit, people. With the possible exception of an opening-weekend "Church Bus Bubble," I think theatrical attendance will be minute, and the movie will end up doing the bulk of its business with DVD sales marketed directly to churches. Right now, Expelled is having a PR nightmare surrounding the screening they kicked PZ out of. Let's keep working that angle, to help the public understand what liars and hypocrites are responsible for this shit. The best thing that could happen would be for the movie to peter out after a week in theaters due to massive public indifference. That won't happen if we raise a big ruckus and make everyone eager to see it out of curiosity over what the fuss is about.

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Addendum: Ames Grawert, who's listed as the group's other admin, replied to my bulletin with the following, which gives me a sense of relief.

I think you're probably right. I've heard this critique from a lot of people. I'll change the description of the group a bit. I like the editorial/education angle a little better.

Very nice. This is a time when cooler heads will prevail. Still, I think this post is relevant, in case there may be any other folks out there considering some kind of overt protest activity on their own.

Last night turning into PR Waterloo for Expelled

Now the whole hilarious story of PZ Myers being thrown out of a screening for Expelled has hit at least one mainstream media outlet. The dishonesty of the people behind this propagandist rubbish is being spread far and wide for the world to see. I laugh. I giggle. I even chortle. Meanwhile, PZ's daughter-of-darkness Skatje has reviewed the movie, and the short version of her take is: Bring a pillow. It sounds like it's a very slapdash affair, and most tellingly, it never does what the promoters are claiming it does: make the case for "intelligent design." They seem to think that intercutting stock footage of Nazis with interviews of scientists constitutes some kind of withering refutation of evolutionary biology. Amateurs.

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Addendum: Now the New York Times has picked the story up, and allows associate producer Mark Mathis to lie at great length, only to be rebutted at the end in full. He really sounds like a blustering little nobody with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove, while Dawkins and PZ and Genie Scott sound mostly bewildered at the staggering foolishness of these people.

But you know, if they weren't fools, they wouldn't be IDiots either.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Dawkins report...

...to bring you this Dawkins-related article of interest from PZ Myers.

It also happens to be the funniest thing I've read on his or any blog all year.

Suffice it to say that the fools behind Expelled just crapped all over themselves in their latest epic fail!

This is just made of awesome!

Expelled = epic fail!

An invitation-only (of course) private screening for Expelled in Florida, held expressly to influence state legislators to support a bogus "academic freedom" bill that's been introduced to counter the recent ruling that schools must teach evolution, tanked miserably, drawing only about 100 viewers. There's a report here. It seems no one (least of all lawmakers, thank goodness) is fooled by the movie's disingenuous message, or its amateurish attempts at stealth marketing.

More embarrassing press for Expelled

The more these clowns responsible for Expelled get any press outside the protected confines of the fundamentalist anti-science subculture, the more desperate and dishonest they look. Now the New York Times has published an article about the whole fracas involving Orlando Sentinel reviewer Roger Moore, the absurd press conference and screening he attended where people were required to sign nondisclosure agreements, and the total harshing of the movie he eventually wrote for the paper.

Hilariously enough, the Times doesn't have to do anything other than let Ben Stein and publicist Paul Lauer speak for themselves to make them look foolish. For instance, the hilarious excuse Lauer gives for disinviting Moore to the screening is that "the film was not polished enough for professional scrutiny," ironically implying that to pass muster amongst the fundamentalist Christian audience they'd hand-picked for their screening, professional polish wasn't necessary. Hey guys, never let it be said you don't respect your audience!

The article makes it abundantly clear just what a hypocritical exercise Expelled is. While on the one hand it assaults its imaginary villain, "Big Science" (led, no doubt, by Michael Myers in full Dr. Evil getup), for disallowing "academic freedom" in "suppressing" ID, on the other hand it clearly only intends to preach to the converted, gearing its marketing solely towards a fundamentalist audience already sufficiently scientifically illiterate to lack the knowledge to know how badly they're being lied to. Keeping out critics from the mainstream media, or anyone who isn't already part of the fundamentalist camp, is something they're dead set on.

As has been remarked upon, if Stein and Lauer and the liars-for-God behind this movie really wanted a free and open exchange of conflicting ideas, they'd host numerous press screenings, not require nondisclosure agreements to be signed (talk about wanting to "control the message"!), and in fact enthusiastically encourage scientists and academics to come to those screenings and debate the film's claims. That they don't is clear indication they don't want knowledgeable people exposing Expelled's campaign of deceit, at least not before that campaign has gained a foothold and spread even more anti-science poison among a populace who's already been crippled by too much of it already.