It Started With Darwinism
Posted on | August 13, 2022 | Comments Off on It Started With Darwinism
About 25 years ago, I read Phillip E. Johnson’s Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education. A law professor at Berkeley, Johnson was also the author of Darwin on Trial, and once remarked, “Something about the Darwinists’ rhetorical style made me think they had something to hide.” This is something any intelligent person must eventually notice. The advocates of coincidence as the explanation of everything become rather skittish when confronted by the most obvious arguments against their theory, and tend to resort to name-calling and censorship to discredit or silence their critics.
The debates prompted by the work of Johnson, William A. Dembski, Michael Behe and other proponents of “Intelligent Design” theory have largely ended for the simple reason that the Darwinists stopped debating, and effectively prohibited dissenters from being employed in academia. The arguments against Darwinism made by Johnson and others were not refuted, but rather were suppressed. And I bring this up because the tactics used to defend Darwinism have now become commonplace.
Those who disagree with the preferred liberal narrative about anything are now accused of promoting “misinformation,” and debate about public policy is increasingly one-sided because the media (including social-media platforms like Twitter and Facebook) seek to silence anyone who opposes or criticizes the preferred liberal narrative.
Over the years, we have seen this method used to suppress dissent over “climate change,” transgenderism, COVID-19 and now, elections:
Like most other popular social media sites, the Powers That Be at Twitter possess grossly inflated opinions of themselves, especially as it relates to what they feel is their supposed “duty” to keep their platform as free from so-called “disinformation” as they possibly can, most notably in election years.
“Twitter plays a critical role in empowering democratic conversations, facilitating meaningful political debate, and providing information on civic participation – not only in the US, but around the world. People deserve to trust the election conversations and content they encounter on Twitter,” the company proclaimed Thursday.
In reality, what they’re doing behind the scenes when they think no one is paying attention is acting as information gatekeepers for Democrats by way of penalizing conservative accounts for WrongThink and for daring to publish or promote unflattering stories and/or asking uncomfortable questions about candidates for higher office along with other high-profile public figures who have the potential to influence public policy.
One of the more notorious examples of this tactic in action was in their deliberate suppression of the New York Post’s blockbuster Hunter Biden laptop emails story in October 2020, just a few weeks out from the presidential election. Not only did they lock down the Post’s main Twitter account for about two weeks, but they also suppressed the story when other Twitter users attempted to share it, something Facebook admitted to doing as well.
Here we are nearly two years later, and Twitter has officially announced yet again in so many words that they are answering Joe Biden’s “special appeal” from January and are, in a nutshell, getting ready to start trying to stack the deck against Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterm elections:
This means we’ll take action against misleading claims about the voting process, misleading content intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the election, or misleading claims that may undermine public confidence in elections outcomes.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) August 11, 2022
Don’t dare say “Orwell” — that’s WrongThink! Anyone who suspects the “Civic Integrity Policy” to be a pretext for acting as Democratic Party enforcers is obviously in violation of the policy, and Twitter’s secret police have given themselves carte blanche to “take action.”
Let us not pretend that Twitter’s action is non-partisan, nor that the suppression of Intelligent Design was a politically neutral action. We ought to acknowledge that our opponents know what they’re doing, and credit them with using every weapon in their arsenal to achieve political hegemony. These things do not happen by coincidence, you see — their actions have meaning and purpose, and are part of an overall plan. Yet we will be told that election results are just part of a natural progression, an impersonal trend beyond the control of any individual.
Perhaps the analogy here is obvious enough that it is redundant for me to point it out, but I will anyway. Darwinists expect us to believe in trends in the universe, where everything is just a series of random coincidences, leading to the conclusion that human life is without meaning or purpose. Your beliefs and behaviors have no moral value, and your life is without significance — you are a statistic, part of the nameless “masses,” just another sheep in the herd. If anyone points out that such a belief system has logical consequences (which is the point Johnson makes in Reason in the Balance), your atheistic antagonist will quickly deny that these consequences are intentional, and you’re a “conspiracy theorist” for suspecting otherwise. Do you see what Johnson meant in saying that the rhetorical style of Darwinists led him to the suspect that they were less than honest? If you suspect their godless theory is merely an instrument for destroying the moral order of society, you are certainly not alone.