Ben Stein also starred in a movie promoting “intelligent design” (aka creationism).
From that link:
It portrays the scientific theory of evolution as a contributor to communism, fascism, atheism, eugenics, and in particular Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust.[3][8]
That is the least surprising, to anyone who’s watched Thirty Rock. I mean Jack Donaghy is a parody of Lorne Michaels.
None of those are particularly shocking, most are pretty famous for their political views. I didn’t know about Drew Carey or Sly Stallone though.
Another former Marine.
Drew Carey is more Libertarian than Conservative, though.
Stallone has been quite vocal about his politics and was on the Trump train pretty early. I don’t think I’ve heard Carey talk about Trump but while he is (or was) a registered Republican he falls more into the moderate libertarian camp and was critical of the US Invasion of Iraq, and he’s spoken in support of a number of Democratic candidates and President Biden in recent years. Lorne Michaels is basically for whomever he thinks is going to benefit him fiscally regardless of who SNL is currently skewering.
Of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a long time Republican and twice-Governor of California, and is one of the most vocal advocates for rational, evidence-based policies on science, education, climate change, et cetera—in essence, a throwback to the Eisenhower era of GOP politics—and a harsh critic of Donald Trump.
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I am constanty surprised at how many really smart people are creationists. I was reading a pretty good book by George Gilder on information theory, and I came across the statement that emergence is impossible, as emergence requires surprise, or something. I couldn’t figure out why he would say something that stupid, then I found out he was with the Discovery Institute, an organization full of scientists dedicated to intelligent design. They don’t believe in evolution, so emergence can’t be a thing, I guess. Despite the evidence of it all around us.
I think that so-called libertarians who’ve drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid aren’t, uh, libertarians. I mean, kind of by definition.
Well, to be fair, although there is massive physical evidence for evolution, it is nearly all circumstantial; except for microorganisms, we don’t observe species to evolve in real time just because of the timescale involved, and the “creationist biologists” like to argue that the effect on single celled organisms can’t be generalized to plants and animals. Even at the genomic level we can observe the impact of genes or gene expression on development but there is no mechanism that evidential forces evolutionary change toward fitness, and since nearly all creationists come from a fundamentalist religious belief system it is trivial to rationalize that it is all at the behest of some kind of invisible god-person making the changes.
You can’t argue with that kind of logic any more than you can build a sensible model of physics in the Warner Brothers Cartoon Universe.
To be honest, most ‘libertarians’ aren’t really libertarians in any real sense; they’re just people who want legal weed and to not pay taxes. The MAGA movement is essentially a proto-fascist movement, and fascists don’t have any problem playing dress up using any ideology that is convenient at the time, and then changing their clothing as necessary.
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Yeah, they rely on the fact that evolutionary theory is not complete to argue that none of it is correct. Of course the evolutionary theory of Darwin was not complete, and we’re still learning about the roles of RNA, epigenetics, and all sorts of stuff that weren’t around when the arguments about evolution were at their peak.
Maybe creationist scientists have their place. It’s always good to have people questioning orthodoxy, so long as they do it in a rational manner. There might not be a God, but there might be problems with evolutionary theory that won’t be discovered byt the people who defend evolution uncritically.
I mean you’d think so. But given the number of libertarians during the height of the “tea party” movement (e.g Kelsey Grammer) who transitioned seamlessly to being avowed MAGAites in the Trump era, the alternative explanation was the whole movement was a thin-veneer on top of a authoritarian nationalist movement that did not give two craps about anyone’s liberty (except the liberty of a few very rich people to avoid paying taxes)
You have to consider that many people support Trump not becuse they love him, but because they think the Democrats are worse. Just as there are Democrats who will support an odious Democratic candidate because they can’t ever bring themselves to vote Republican. Such is the nature of tribalism and partisanship.
The Democrats support some pretty odious people themselves:
Bob Menendez got re-elected in 2006 after serious corruption allegations. He kept getting elected even though he was indicted in 2015 for corruption (ending in a mistrial), admonished in 2018 over a different corruption episode, and indicted again in 2023, after his bribes from Egypt were discovered. In 2015 he was forced to resign from the Foreign Relations committee because of suspicions of bribery, but somehowmmanaged to land on it again in 2021and he still sits on the foreign relations committee despite having taken bribes from foreign countries. Just in October new charges were filed call8ng basically an agent of Egypt’s. Yet the Democrats didn’t even remove him from the Foreign Relations committee. Even John Fetterman called that out.
Marion Barry got re-elected after doing time for drugs.
William Jefferson was re-elected after $90,000 was found in his freezer after an FBI corruption investigation. It wasn’t until he was actually convicted that he lost his next election.
I’m not trying to suggest Democrats are bad, or worse than Republicans. I’m just saying that if you can’t figure out why people would vote for Trump, maybe a good idea would be to think about why anyone would still vote for Menendez. Or Joe Biden, for that matter.
There is another aspect to this: there are people who now support Trump who didn’t before because they think it’s the Democrats threatening Democracy by throwing the book at J6 defendents, using the FBI as a political weapon, trying to censor the media, etc. I think that’s way overblown, as are the claims that Teump will be a dictator. But when people believe such nonsense, that’s all they need to vote against the ‘other’.
Some people see Trump as the only one who will ‘fight’ the ‘deep state’, and every time Trump gets indicted on another thing, support for him grows as they see it as another example of a runaway government trying to use the legal system to stop its major opponent.
Let me ask you: If Trump wins and suddenly Joe Biden or Gavin Newsom is hit with investigations and indictments, would the Democrats say, “Oh no! Our guy is a crook! I guess we have to let the other side win.”, or would they claim shenanigans and rally around the person in question?
Note: Don’t attack me for these positions. I don’t hold them. But I make a point of following what both sides are saying.
Do you have a cite for this? I mean, I’m sure there might be at least a couple of idiots who meet this description, but do you have any evidence that it’s more than a minuscule number?
Uh, that is not a conservative I would use as an example. They fired her for having very extreme views, like comparing the treatment of conservatives to the treatments of Jews in Nazi Germany. Or supporting the fake news about fraudulent elections in 2020, among other things.
Well, I’m not sure how to cite that. I can cite individual comments or articles, but that won’t tell us how many people hold those views.
But Google “FBI Gestapo” and you’ll get a whole bunch of MAGA nonsense about how the FBI are now Joe Biden’s secret police. Googling “j6 Persecution” or “J6 political prisoners” will return a ton of hits. And since I make a point to follow MAGA, libertarian, liberal, socialist and other political conversations, I can tell you that the idea that Biden is presiding over a weaponized government is a common belief on the far right.
Extremists on both sides now seem to think that the next election will be the last one, since both sides are now claiming that the other is seeking dictatorial control. It’s batshit crazy on both sides, but there you go.
She made a stupid comparison to the Holocaust. Not to deny it, but basically to say ,“This thing was like the Holocaust”.
If I had a nickel for every time a public figure made a stupid comparison to the holocaust, I’d… have a lot of nickels. Godwin’s law was invented to call it out.
She said the election rules need to be tighhtened up so people don’t feel uneasy about the result.
These are the odious comments that warrented her career being destroyed?
Let me know when a Democrat calls to overturn an election telling his followers to “fight like hell” based on lies. Chances are, in the following election. It is the Republicans that will field a candidate that did so in the past.
Nope, cant have this one, pushing the narrative of fake elections results has caused a lot of harm. And those were not the only odious comments, and if she had shown any remorse… that would have been different.
I’m sure lots of people have really, really dumb beliefs, but I’m challenging the idea that there are a bunch (or any significant number) of people who previously opposed Trump but now support him because the DoJ and Georgia/NY prosecutors are actually trying to hold him accountable for his misdeeds. That sounds to me about as likely as a bunch of Trump supporters now deciding to support Biden because the GOP House is constantly lying about him.
"Sure, I opposed Trump while he was praising domestic Nazis and cuddling up with murderous dictators and shitting on our constitution and fomenting a literal attempt at insurrection. That’s all really bad stuff and nobody should support a politician like that. But then when the duly elected administration (which Trump tried to overturn and that was really bad) prosecuted those obvious criminals for their obvious crimes? That was really the last straw. Now it’s MAGA all the way!
“But I definitely, definitely, definitely wasn’t a Trump supporter before.”
These were not the innocuous comments that you represent them as:
And Carano’s career was not “destroyed”; she was fired from a show where she played a fungible character whose main personality trait was punching things real good for making statements widely regarded as bigoted and offensive.
Or calls up election officials and inveighs them to somehow “…find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have…” Or made ‘jokes’ about how he might remain in office past the Constitutionally-limited two terms. Or talked about punishing or jailing specific political opponents. Both sides, amirite?
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