Persecution of Darwin Skeptics in 2021 Likely to Get Worse

The way cancel culture grew in 2020, it will probably skyrocket in 2021 under a leftist government.

Two curves are moving in opposite trajectories. One curve is the evidence against evolution; this curve keeps rising. The other is the curve of free speech to share this evidence; that curve is falling. The two curves should be rising together, the second curve being a consequence of the first. Instead, the curve of free speech for Darwin skeptics has been trending downward ever since the Scopes Trial 95 years ago. It will accelerate downward if leftists and socialists and globalists take over the reins of power. During the Trump administration, there were initiatives to protect free speech and freedom of religion. Expect those protections to be washed away by leftists in the Democrat party,* because totalitarian thinking is in their DNA.

*Not speaking of the historic Democrat party that used to value free speech, but the current party that has moved steadily toward the radical left, especially since 2016.

Dr Jerry Bergman, a contributing writer for Creation-Evolution Headlines, has documented in great detail the persecution of Darwin skeptics in his trilogy shown below.

Dr Bergman has published 3 books of true stories of careers ruined by Darwinist censors.

These books tell stories of lives and careers ruined by the Darwin secret police, but they also document much more than that. In the second volume, Bergman tells how civil liberties institutions, colleges and the courts have done the exact opposite of their duty—that of protecting the free flow of ideas in science—by silencing Darwin skeptics. In volume 3, Bergman extends the record with examples of censorship in libraries, bookstores, textbooks, the internet, the granting of research funds, and much more. The victims of this persecution are not always Christians and young-earth creationists, or members of the intelligent design community. Some eye-opening cases involve secular scientists who dared to waver from the Darwin consensus in some way. Since the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed aired in 2008, in which actor Ben Stein made an impassioned plea for freedom to follow the evidence where it leads, the situation has deteriorated further. Is it going to get worse?

Canary in the Coal Mine

The Discovery Institute maintains, in addition to its website Evolution News & Science Today, a website promoting freedom of thought in regards to origins. FreeScience.today tells selected true stories of individuals who lost jobs, careers and tenure because of running afoul of the Darwin Party. The site includes news about the issue of freedom of speech, a petition for academic freedom that citizens can share, and suggestions for how organizers can work to promote viewpoint freedom in academia, media and public policy.

And yet 2021 has arrived, with the Darwin dictatorship still entrenched. Many observers of the depressing year 2020 have noted the increase in shout-downs, doxing, and other censoring activities by intolerant leftist radicals. The old “free speech” movement among hippies in the 1960s has been turned upside down. Now, radicals are not asking to speak their views; they work to forbid people from sharing views that differ from what is considered “politically correct” (an Orwellian label if there ever was one). Last May, a pro-Darwin journal advocated government censorship of Evolution News & Views.

Conservatives face riots if they try to speak on college campuses. Big Media and Big Tech blatantly censor anyone—even Congresspersons or the President of the United States—by some arbitrary code of correctness that even the censors cannot elucidate. The censorship is so arbitrary, people have had their accounts canceled even for stating leftist ideas with the wrong words that the censors misunderstood. It’s becoming chaotic. When rioters pull down statues of Abraham Lincoln, it’s clear that facts and reason left the stage long ago. Will it become like the French Revolution, where the guillotine beheaded anyone who was perceived (true or not) as an enemy of the state? Even Robespierre, the revolution’s leader, met his fate at the feet of Madame Guillotine. A radical revolution eats its own.

Darwin skeptics find this all too familiar. Neurosurgeon Dr Michael Egnor wrote “A note from the canaries” at Evolution News:

Forced Darwinian orthodoxy was the first glimmer of a much larger project now gaining stride. We in the ID movement have been fighting censorship, mandated orthodoxy and professional destruction of dissenters for quite a while. Most Americans are well-intentioned and support the ID perspective, but have not been motivated to work actively for the cause of academic freedom. It is now clear that forced orthodoxy in science and in our society as a whole threatens all of us. ID proponents have been the canaries in this coal mine. Now that the spread of this cancer is obvious to all, we ask others in the scientific community and in America as a whole to join us in the struggle to preserve freedom of speech and thought and respect for diversity of opinion in our schools and universities and in our nation.

Not Much Hope Ahead

Unless the last two seats in the Senate go Republican on January 6th, leftists may soon control all three branches of the federal government. This is not to say that all Democrats are censors. They have done precious little, however, to protect the rights of conservatives and Republicans to express their views in the mainstream media, social media and college campuses. No speaker at the Democrat National Convention last summer said anything about the radical riots that were ravaging major cities, depriving innocent people of life, liberty and property. The Democrats pride themselves on being the party of “science” which, in their view, is the party of consensus. They show little interest or understanding of the philosophy and history of science that has plenty of skeletons in its closet (see Dr Bergman’s book, left). Since the leftist majority in academia are hardcore Darwinians, they will certainly use their influence and power to continue crushing Darwin skeptics at every opportunity, holding high the banner of “science” (see footnote). When they can’t ignore them or ridicule them, they will work to ban their influence in textbooks, schools and presentations.

Censorship in social media picked up steam in 2020. Google lists search results to favor Democrats, prioritizes leftist stories in its news feeds, and either labels or censors conservative content on YouTube. Facebook does the same. Twitter “shadow bans” conservative tweets and drops accounts at a whim for “violating community standards” (which are as subjective as fogma). Although not yet banning creation-related tweets, it is conceivable that any message that denigrates Darwin will be censored. Leftist censorship in the mainstream media (print and broadcast) is so obvious to everyone it’s not even controversial. Anything that could have put the Democrat candidates in a bad light, such as the Hunter Biden scandal, was ignored or cut by the censors till after the election. Nobody can deny that Joe Biden was hoisted up by selective reporting, whereas over 90% of coverage of Donald Trump has been negative for 4 years – often nastily so.

Against this backdrop, the ability of Darwin skeptics to share their views looks tenuous. Here are some of the things they could do in the new regime:

• Pressure ISPs to drop customers who publish Darwin-skeptical content.
• Pass laws to make college freshmen sign a statement affirming Darwinism.
• Prohibit churches from denouncing evolution as a condition of tax exemption.
• Prevent foster parents and adopting parents from sending children to non-Darwin schools.
• Requiring “de-programming” classes for students raised under Darwin-skeptic parents.
• Classifying Darwin skepticism as a hate crime, a forbidden religion or a view derived from white privilege.

All of the classic methods of censorship documented by Jerry Bergman could increase in frequency and intensity. The censorship is already extreme, but totalitarians never seem to run out of propaganda tactics. The left, Democrats and the Darwinians are agents of totalitarianism. This is clear from the cancel culture. They don’t want debate about evidence; they want complicity, and will destroy careers and voices through intimidation, ridicule and subversion without hesitation or shame. In totalitarian regimes, one is not even allowed to think wrong thoughts. Citizens are prevented from hearing alternate views, while the party line is carefully crafted to seem intuitively obvious. The regime erects an iron curtain that stops outside voices from being heard, and jams the airwaves of broadcasts by enemies of the Party. When you see such things, ask what it is they are afraid of? What do they have to hide? If the evidence is so obvious for Darwinism, why not let their case endure scrutiny and stand up on its own?

Never Be Complicit

The collapse will come in due time.

Truth is its own justification. Truth has abiding power. Lies eventually collapse, like in the famous tale “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” Regimes of lies are like houses built on sand, which are doomed. Before the collapse, the inhabitants can pretend everything is solid. They will keep pronouncing with great authority that the regime is strong. They will persecute those who ask questions. They will accuse them of believing in “conspiracy theories” or being enemies of the state. The inhabitants become increasingly suspicious of each other and everyone else. For an extreme case, consider East Germany behind the Berlin Wall; everyone lived in fear and kept silent because of hidden spies, who were everywhere. Even neighbors and friends were treated with suspicion to avoid the midnight knock on the door. Better say nothing than risk that! And yet the Berlin Wall came down in virtually one night.

Truth is the motivation to persist against overwhelming odds. Michael Egnor wrote another piece called “Live Not By Lies,” based on Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s last article that led to his exile from the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn taught that no one can force you to believe a lie. You don’t have to participate; you can always just walk away or say nothing. Truth is honorable, and those who commit to the truth can stay sane when the world around them is going crazy. Creationism and intelligent design are built on the rock; they stand strong despite the angry rhetoric, ridicule and censorship of the Darwin Party. CEH will continue to hold up the truth no matter what happens this year until and unless the plug is pulled somehow on its ability to publish. We hope our readers will stand with us against the gathering storm.

Update 1/08/2021: A major purge of conservative voices on social media began today. As we write, Twitter is deleting thousands of accounts and followers of anyone claiming that the Biden vote was fraudulent. They have permanently banned Donald Trump’s account—the president of the United States!—twelve days before he leaves the White House. Apple and Google have deleted the alternative site Parler from their app stores. Some are comparing this to Kristallnacht, a prelude of worse things to come.

Big Tech’s alleged justification is to prevent more violence after the riots in the US Capitol two days prior. President Trump’s “Save America” speech to huge crowds (estimated 200,000 or so) in front of the White House, a calm and peaceful event, turned ugly afterward. A small percentage of the crowd forcibly entered the Capitol, causing damage and invading the Congressional chambers, overwhelming capitol police and causing chaos. One Trump supporter (a female Air Force veteran) was shot dead by the police in the melee. Eyewitness reports on video, however, indicate that the rioters were communist revolutionaries from Antifa and Black Lives Matter posing as Trump supporters with MAGA hats on, who had come equipped with hammers, wall climbers and riot gear to break windows and get inside (see clips on Rudy Giuliani’s “Common Sense” YouTube channel for January 8). More eyewitness testimonies are coming out that this is indeed what happened. Other video clips, strangely, show police opening doors for people to enter the Capitol rotunda. Some peaceful Trump supporters may have thought it was permissible to enter, and became mixed in with the rioters. This would give a false impression of a large number being involved in the break-in.

The purpose of the Antifa rioters, who had apparently planned this days in advance and arrived by busloads, was to make Trump Supporters look bad. The videos show genuine Trump supporters helping the police and shouting at the vandalists to stop, but the rioters apparently succeeded in controlling the narrative on the news. All the mainstream media were blaming the riot on Trump supporters, and blaming Trump himself for inciting violence (which he never did; he only invited the crowd to make their voices heard). Thus, Big Tech responded that they had to censor conservatives and Trump supporters—including Republican congressmen and Trump himself—to “prevent further violence.” The events became like a Reichstag Fire that could be blamed on the innocent to advance a cause.

Another plan of the rioters may have been to disrupt Congress from hearing objections to the vote counts by the electoral college. Some 100 Congresspersons had planned to object to the votes, believing that fraud had corrupted the totals in six key swing states, so that their electoral votes should be disallowed. The riot occurred in the middle of debate on the objections, causing both the Senate and the House to evacuate for several hours. When they regathered, clearly shaken by the riot, many dropped their challenges to the electoral college votes and simply confirmed Biden as president-elect in the middle of the night. This last-ditch effort to have the evidence of fraud presented, therefore, was precluded by the timing of the riot. Such tactics are reminiscent of the rise to power of previous totalitarian revolutions, where voices contrary to the regime are censored. Today’s censorship actions by Big Tech happened so suddenly, it is conceivable that censorship of Darwin skeptics could be ramped up at any time.   —End of update.

Dr Egnor makes one other astute observation in his “Live Not By Lies” article: “They’re terrified of ridicule.”

The censors depend on active personal destruction not to silence us, but to get us (out of fear) to lie and thus silence ourselves. Their power is not in their violence but in our complicity. 

Don’t be complicit. Don’t participate. Don’t give assent to Darwinist or atheist or Marxist lies. If you’re a teacher, let your students know (implicitly if you cannot do so explicitly) that the Darwinism you are forced to teach is not, as the censors insist, a perfect doctrine with strengths only and no weaknesses. If you are a scientist, don’t include nonsensical Darwinist tropes in your publications or even in your conversations. When others tell Darwinian fairytales, if you are not in a position to openly reply, a quip or a joke (they’re terrified of ridicule) or just a smirk or rolled eyes is resistance. You can always just walk away.

Evolutionists take themselves so seriously, but their beliefs are ridiculous (see, for example, the examples in our 21 Dec 2020 article, “On the Evolution of Cuteness”). When forced to listen to a serious Darwin just-so story, consider the power of a well-timed, audible guffaw (see ending commentary in the 16 April 2020 post).

Footnote: The Darwin Party expropriates to itself the noble banner of science primarily by asserting it through repetition (Evolution is science! Creation is religion!) or with bandwagon arguments. But since Darwinism is equivalent to the Stuff Happens Law (SHL), they can “prove” it is scientific, too! Consider how the SHL meets all the criteria of science. Read this aloud with your best chuckling voice:

• The Stuff Happens Law aids understanding; it explains everything.
• It is reductive: All events can be reduced to the SHL.
• It makes predictions: Stuff will happen.
• It is universal: Stuff always happens.
• It is normative, not just descriptive: Given matter in motion, stuff must happen.
• It is falsifiable: If nothing happens, the law has been disproved.
• It is practical: If something happens, you know you will find stuff around.
• Corollaries can be derived from it:
  • Stuff happens at the worst possible time.
  • Bad stuff happens to good people.
  • Murphy’s Law: Whatever can go wrong, will.