Elena LaVictoire's Library tagged Expelled →  View Popular

Then, two things happened to change and end my career at the
Times. Well, maybe three. The Times told me
they were forced by budgetary pressures to only run me every four
weeks. This was a blow and I started to think about where else I
might write. (I had been solicited by many major publications
while at the Times but my editors had asked me not to
write for them and I did as asked.)

But the two main things, as I see them, were that I started
criticizing Mr. Obama quite sharply over his policies and
practices. I had tried to do this before over the firing of Rick
Wagoner from the Chairmanship of GM. My column had questioned
whether there was a legal basis for the firing by the government,
what law allowed or authorized the federal government to fire the
head of what was then a private company, and just where the Obama
administration thought their limits were, if anywhere. This
column was flat out nixed by my editors at the Times
because in their opinion Mr. Obama inherently had such powers.

Stein and the film's producers maintain that belief in evolutionary biology makes societies more likely to succumb to totalitarianism. The flick is replete with grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies, Nazi thugs, Stalin, Hitler, and concentration camps. The filmmakers portray opposition to teaching ID in universities and public schools as a threat to freedom on a par with Communist and Nazi repression. But ID proponents in the academy are not being dragged off to concentration camps by goose-stepping Darwinist thugs—the worst thing they suffer is the loss of their jobs. That's not fun, but it's not the gas chamber either.

The film begins with moody shots of Ben Stein backstage before he addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and declares that freedom is the essence of America. So far, so good. Then he muses, What if our freedom was taken away? In fact, Stein asserts that this is already happening. We are losing our freedom in one of the most important sectors of our society—science.