- A rousing SRO preview on Tuesday of the new Ben Stein
documentary, 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,' brought a Kansas City
audience to its feet.
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- And with good cause. Stein's often funny, always engaging
frontal assault on the oppressive neo-Darwinist establishment is arguably
the smartest and most sophisticated documentary ever produced on the right
side of the cultural divide, on any subject, ever.
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- As such, Expelled represents still another blow to the
progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent.
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- The winter started early when in November two separate
labs, one in Wisconsin, one in Japan, announced the breakthrough discovery
that adult skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells.
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- Just two years earlier, the elfin journalist Chris Mooney
had likened adult stem cell research to creationism and assured the readers
of his best seller, The Republican War on Science, that this "dogma"
had been "resoundingly rejected by researchers actually working in
the field."
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- As the winter rolled on, and as all four major global
temperature tracking outlets showed a precipitous drop in annual global
temperature, and as snow fell in Baghdad for the first time in recorded
history, only Al Gore remained in meltdown.
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- Meanwhile, on a seemingly daily basis, the neo-Luddites
from the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front have been
putting a distinctly left wing face on the "war on science,"
in this case a real war on real scientists.
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- And into this breach, armed with his trademark tennies
and bemused grin, marches Ben Stein, America's only economist/ presidential
speechwriter turned comic actor. The producers at Premise Media could not
have recruited a better on-screen presence.
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- Although the role Stein plays has been compared to the
one Michael Moore plays in his film, the Stein persona is conspicuously
brighter and more benign.
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- Nor do Stein and his producers resort to the kind of
editing that make Moore movies something other than documentaries.
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- In Bowling For Columbine , for instance, Moore cobbles
together five different parts of NRA honcho Charlton Heston's Denver speech
a week after Columbine.
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- Moore then inserts into the mix a "cold, dead hands"
remark from a speech Heston gave a year later. In the process Moore turn
Heston's conciliatory Denver address into a provocative call to arms.
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- This isn't film making. This is fraud.
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- Stein resorts to no such tricks. He gives certain interview
subjects all the time and all the rope they need to hang themselves, unedited.
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- One highlight among many is Stein's one-on-one interview
with Richard Dawkins, the dashing Brit who has made a small fortune as
the world's most visible neo-Darwinist.
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- To his credit, and to the utter discomfort of the public
education establishment, Dawkins does not shy from discussing the atheistic
implications of Darwinism.
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- Indeed, Dawkin's anti-deity call to arms, The God Delusion,
has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Where Dawkins wanders into
a black hole of his own making is in his discussion of the origins of life
on earth.
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- To Stein's astonishment, Dawkins concedes that life might
indeed have a designer but that designer almost assuredly was a more highly
evolved being from another planet, not "God."
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- Stein does not respond. He does not need to. For the
past hour of the film, the audience has met one scientist after another
whose academic careers have been derailed for daring to suggest the possibility
of intelligent design.
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- If only they had thought to put the designer on another
planet!
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- The choice of Stein as narrator is inspired for another
reason. That reason becomes most apparent when he and two "creationist"
allies, mathematician David Berlinski and nuclear physicist Gerald Schroeder,
visit a remnant of the Berlin Wall, the central metaphor of the film.
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- At the wall, the three discuss the value of freedom,
the central idea of the film, and the need for the same in science. The
audience has already met Berlinski, an amusingly sophisticated American
living in Paris.
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- The audience has seen less of Schroeder, but he is wearing
a yarmulke. All three are Jewish.
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- Indeed, it would be hard to imagine any three individuals
on the planet who less resemble the Inherit the Wind stereotype that Darwinists
have been scaring soccer moms with for the last half century.
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- Expelled opens nationwide on April 18 th. The neo-Darwinists
and their allies in the major media will do their best to kill it.
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- Co-producer Mark Mathis tells me that two network news
producers have already chosen not to cover the film because it was "biased,"
unlike, say, the much-covered Fahrenheit 911.
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- The producers have contracted with the same firm that
marketed Mel Gibson's The Passion to get the word out. They will use much
the same strategy.
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- Central to this strategy is the creation of a powerful
buzz and a strong enough opening weekend to catch Hollywood's attention
and hold it.
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- Put April 18 on your calendars. Bring the kids. You won't
be disappointed.
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- http://expelledthemovie.com/blog/
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