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Why Oscar Will Expel ‘Expelled’
Posted by Tom Hoopes
Sunday, January 11, 2009 2:18 AM
The best (and top grossing) documentary of 2008 won’t get an Academy Award nomination. The truths in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed are too inconvenient for official awards.
Three key questions explain why.
When interviewer Douglas Todd steps back from his passive-aggressive personal take on the movie to allow producer Walter Ruloff to speak, the interview provides some intriguing information.
Q: Why did the movie have a confrontational tone?
A: Because it was dull without it.
Ruloff is quoted saying the first version of the movie “leaned heavily on computer-generated images of cells, illustrating how their development relied on more than random mutation.”
Said Ruloff: “When we first watched that movie it was verrrrry boring.”
Q: Why does the movie liken Darwinists to Nazis?
A: Because the Jewish star of the movie insisted on it.
At the beginning of the interview, the Canadian columnist manipulates his subject’s comments to make it seem like Ruloff threw Nazis into the mix just “to generate anger.”
But Todd later lets slip that Ben Stein, the Jewish comedian-commentator who narrates the movie, insisted on it.
Stein has said it was Ruloff who initially “got in touch with me and said he wanted to do something about Darwinism and how it leads to social Darwinism, which leads to Nazism and the Holocaust.”
According to the article, “because of his Jewish heritage, Ruloff said, Stein came up with the idea of linking scientific Darwinism to the concentration camps.”
Said Ruloff: “It was always Ben Stein. He was fascinated with the underlying scenarios for mass-scale eugenics.”
Describes the article: “The final version of Expelled includes chilling reels of the Berlin Wall, of soldiers, of machine-guns, of scolding school principals and of extermination camps where “inferior” people, the disabled and Jews, were slaughtered.”
Todd was surprised to find that Ruloff actually believes that “survival of the fittest” philosophies lead to “survival of the fittest” behaviors.
Ruloff “‘absolutely’ agrees with many points Expelled makes linking Darwinism to abortion and eugenics and death camps.” Darwinism does so, he said, because it does not accept “the sanctity of life.”
Q: Was the movie too rough on Darwinist scientists?
A: Are you nuts?
Ruloff answered: “You’re supposed to question the current paradigm, the orthodoxies, of science. But we’re not allowed to challenge the premises of so-called neo-Darwinism. It’s crazy,” Ruloff said.
“What we really wanted to do was give scientists more courage. Science is in such lockdown,” Ruloff told the Canadian columnist. “The only way we can give scientists courage is if we deal with the issue head-on — in kind of an American style.”
Expelled attacks the “process of hyper-political correctness in the academy,” said Ruloff. “It’s getting worse. We wanted to expose the hypocrisy and the inconsistencies.”
Ruloff and Stein plan a documentary on the economic crisis next …
— Tom Hoopes
| Filed under movies, weekend commentary
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