Insurrectionist Design, and the Discovery Insurrectionists

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I’ve always found the Discovery Institute to be an odd bunch. And I have found it odder that some people don’t always see them as an odd bunch. A burning question, when one is dealing with an anti-science organization like the DI, is whether these are honest, albeit delusional, people with whom positive engagement is worthwhile, or whether they are liars bent on ripping our culture apart and destroying the foundations of our society, who need to be met and answered with harsh and intense condemnation.

Well, I just happened to bump into this little obscenity yesterday. A DI fellow, writing in the interval between the election and the January 6 coup attempts, wrote to endorse the coup.

Now, I have the sense that sometimes some people roll their eyes a bit when it is suggested that the DI is filled with authoritarian theocrats and the like. But with this sort of thing going on, who really can be fooled by the DI’s pretensions at civilization? Who really can say that he believes the DI keeps pushing its bizarre views purely out of some honest belief that IDC is scientifically credible? How many badges and banners of the war to destroy our culture does the DI have to display before we can all acknowledge what the DI really is?

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There are some of each, I would think.

The organization, as a whole, seems very much oriented toward fighting the culture wars.

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It’s far worse. The author of this article, one Scott Powell, is a DI Senior Fellow, and frequent contributor to their political commentaries. He was the author of this article originally on the DI site, later removed, but also published on the American Thinker, where it is still up at The Supreme Court and the Electoral Coup - American Thinker

To quote [emphases added]:

It’s out in the open for everyone with eyes and ears, not only here in the United States but around the world. The November U.S. Presidential election produced a fraudulent result – appearing to deliver a defeat for extraordinarily popular and remarkably successful incumbent President Donald Trump and a victory for extraordinarily unimpressive Democrat challenger Joe Biden…

Changing rules in these ways in key swing states created ambiguities that contributed to voting irregularities, such as over-voting, ballot harvesting, filing fraudulent ballots from dead people still on the voter rolls, ballot dumps, and other fraud and poll place shenanigans. And then there was the use of Dominion voting machines.

Dominion vice president of U.S. engineering, Eric Coomer, is on record acknowledging the programmability of Dominion voting technology to fix votes, saying “Don’t worry about the election; Trump’s not going to win. I made f*ing sure of that!”

Common sense, longstanding predictable voting behavior patterns in many specific jurisdictions, big data statistical pattern analysis and forensic analysis of Dominion Voting Systems machines and software, and polling place wrongdoings in the contested states don’t just reveal garden variety voting irregularities, but rather overwhelming massive voter and polling place fraud …

For those with critical thinking faculties and a knowledge of history, there can be little doubt that this extraordinary energetic leader Donald Trump is what is needed for a time such as this. With America facing almost insurmountable challenges and unfinished business, a decisive majority of Americans voted for his reelection because they sensed that a return to a corrupt establishment government was simply not an acceptable option. The Supreme Court needs to do its job of adjudication and protect and save the Constitution at this critical time .

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Yeah, you’re right on that. That’s quite a piece by Powell.

I remember that period of time, because in my not-arguing-with-creationists phase of life, I was spending a lot of time answering questions by friends on FB and e-mail about election litigation. I was not an election litigator, but a lot of the election litigation WAS civil rights statute-based, so while some of it was very much outside of my expertise, some of it was very familiar. I have never seen such a splatter of liquefied batshit, to use a technical litigation term, as I saw in the two months between the election and January 6. Much of the litigation was downright incoherent, and a great deal of it, e.g., the weird Louis Gohmert-inspired State of Texas attempt to sue other states in the Supreme Court, was profoundly and obviously wrong. You couldn’t have tested first-year law students with it as a hypothetical because everyone in the room would see what was wrong immediately and there’d be very little difference between exam papers.

Vic Walczak, by the way, one of the litigation team in Kitzmiller, spent quite a bit of time working on the Pennsylvania cases brought by the Orange Peril team. His FB posts on them were hilarious, at least for a crusty old civil rights lawyer like me; they may, like the jokes told at a convention of accountants, be less hilarious the further you are from that particular domain of expertise. But it is fair to say that much of what was filed was at the too-embarrassing-for-a-lawyer-with-self-respect-to-sign-the-brief level of litigation.

And yet these people forged ahead. For people like Powell it is not important that they are wrong. It is not important that they KNOW they are wrong. It is important that they deepen and widen the culture-war gulf, in the interests of undermining every decent American value that has held this country together. Even the litigation losses have value in that cause, as they’ve been stoking the myth for decades of an entrenched “liberal” judiciary which can easily be cast as just another villain in the story.

And that is, I think, what one must understand about ID Creationism. It has nothing to do with science; it has never had anything to do with science; its pretensions of being science are not aimed at converting the educated, but at enraging the ignorant. And these people would love nothing more than to set the world on fire; they have all the charm, and all the human decency, of the Bolsheviks.

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Originally published at The Epoch Times

Well, there it is.

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Saw that too - I looked up The Epoch Times, but I wasn’t expecting Falun Gong.

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This made me think, are they also into antivaxx? So I went to their website and top of the front page, right now, we have

U.S. Military Uses Religious Test Against Service Members To Enforce Vaccine Mandate

The military is denying requests for religious exemptions because officials disagree with the theological views of service members.

Jay W. Richards

January 3, 2022

Members of our military pledge their loyalty to the Constitution. Its First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion. So, it would be perverse to force men and women in uniform to abandon their deeply held religious beliefs to serve their country.

Ofc, there is no religious body that opposes vaccines, and we are anyway talking about active servicemen ho have all had a pincushionfull already, but, as you say, that’s not the point

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Douglas Axe wrote a book about COVID, The Price of Panic. Not specifically antivax in that case, but odds are it’s pretty hard-core pseudoscience. It looks like a stinker, but while medical quackery was a great interest of mine once upon a time, I don’t think I have the stomach to read it.

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Originally published at The Federalist

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Unlike CMI, which, for all its absurdities and lies, is pretty accurate about COVID and vaccines, DI seems to harbor generally covid-truther and antivax (or if we’re being generous truther-and-antivax-adjacent) views.

But really, they told us the point decades ago, before they renamed The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. The name changed, but the purpose didn’t.

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The Trump presidency, friendly reminder:

The Trump Presidency
The Trump Presidency1359×960 124 KB

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Do friendly reminders cause people to nod their heads in disappointment?

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