I'll Say It Again, The ACLU Line Is That Trump Has The Right To Yell Fire In A Crowded Theater - Perhaps a last response on this, for now

THE COMPLAINT that I have repeatedly called America's evil tradition of white supremacy our indigenous form of fascism is, I think, a complaint of those who are largely white and, especially, privileged by wealth, whiteness, maleness, straightness, etc.  complaining that flows from never having to have thought about the consequences of the political power and legal power of white supremacy under and through the Constitution, the laws, the habits of the white majority in the United States. A power that rules far more states in 2023 than it did before 1964 when the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were adopted.   I'll expand on that because white supremacy is not alone, though it is the most central locus of corruption, anti-equality and anti-democratic success in the United States.  It is the contemporary version of what the abolitionists called "slave power" which never really ended, only briefly eclipsed in two periods, the Reconstruction after the Civil War and the brief period in which the 1960s civil rights laws were in full effect, something which the "free press" rulings of the Warren Court started to end with the election of Nixon in 1968.  

It was one of the most important insights of my lifetime of thinking about the history, the politics, the legal apparatus, institutions, etc. that really govern us when I realized that for most of our history in most places in the United States Native Americans, Black People, other Peoples of Color, Women, especially those who were not white, various other minority groups, the poor have lived under a degree of fascism.  At times and in some places as deadly as any European fascism, in few times and in few places has that not been, the case to some extent.  In every time in our history being a person in those groups has been the equivalent of wearing a sign that person was Jewish in Nazi Germany or in medieval Europe, the parallels are so obvious that the same word, ghetto, was used for places where Black People were relegated to living in in cities under de facto as well as de jure segregation.

They directly experienced that even as the privileged population didn't much and pretended that was democracy and freedom.  The genocidal policy of the colonies and then states, the land stealing that was as much a part of that genocide as outright murder is not only identical to the policies of Nazis and other fascists, it was cited in fascist and Nazi literature as an example of the possibilities of their own intended genocides.  The enslavement, terrorism, murder, economic exploitation and oppression of Black People is another indisputable experience of life under fascism.  The terror campaign against Women is so embedded into all of those things, especially into the culture of, not only the United States but the world that Women largely don't notice the dangers and restrictions they live under constantly.  I could as easily note that male supremacy is another indigenous form of fascism.  Though the progress for white Women, especially those with money and wealthy families was far faster and more extensive than for than Women without money from poor families.  In the decades of white supremacist complaints about affirmative action, I never once recall hearing one of its opponents mention the foremost beneficiaries of affirmative action, white women, especially white women with wealth.  That fascism on a sliding scale is also true for LGBTQ+ People.  Rich white gay men, on a whole have far safer lives than Gay Men of Color. As I mentioned the other day Trans Women of Color are among those under the strongest terror campaign right now resulting in them having among the highest murder rates of any identifiable group.  The privileges available to those who are privileged, of course, goes up as wealth goes up, poor whites may have it better than even middle class or even some affluent People of Color but they are still nothing like equal to wealthy white People, especially the filthy rich.  A lot of that can depend on how bad your job is, as well.  The second part of the story of the fascist genocide against Native Americans and the domination of People of Color and other minorities is that poor whites got largely suckered by that scheme.  The Republican-fascist hearings on gas stoves and ceiling fans is the modern day version of how those who really rule us suckered them with distractions from how the system really didn't work for them.   The overwhelming majority of the "free press" was part of the peddling of that suckering job, the part that didn't was always a small fraction of the "free press".  And I'm not talking only about the tabloid and cabloid level of media, most of the most august organs of the media have been part of it too.  The entertainment division, getting the most eyes and ears, the biggest part of that.  

In those lists I've posted this week of the stars of "civil liberties,"- lists not chosen by me but either chosen by authors of articles or the self-chosen lawyers who wrote legal papers -  the whiteness, the maleness, the straightness, the Ivy Leagueness and the affluence of them could not be more obvious.  I could go through articles written by white members of the scribbling class panicked over lawyers of Color and Women in the ACLU who express deep skepticism over the traditional "free speech-press" ideology of that group and of the putrid "civil liberties" industry.  It's something that you can also find it in university and college faculties in which it is largely white male faculty, generally those with tenure and full positions (and their faculty wives) who whine the hardest when students won't put up with their casual racism, their sexism, their many habits and expressions which make the lives of students of Color, Women, and members of other minority groups more difficult, not to mention any tendencies they have to favor those they might consciously or unconsciously perceive as people like themselves, the male, the straight, the white, the affluent, the already advantaged.*

I will point out that in many academic fields, that is entirely relevant to the quality of what they put out as scholarship.  For example, the difference between an historian who writes a hagiographic and seriously covered up account of, say a Justice John Marshall and someone such as Paul Finkleman who finds out how deeply he was enriched by slavery and by the rulings he made while on the Court, the difference is  extremely important.  White supremacy by slave owners and their judicial allies has certainly had and has a direct effect on Peoples lives.  The historians who could write biographies of a Christopher Columbus while ignoring his, the first genocide against Natives of the Americas, the continuation of that by the "founding fathers" and the entire history of American government UNDER THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS, are the opposite of innocuous in their effect.  The mainstream of academic writing and on up in malignant influence in that short list above, to the most malignant of that in entertainment tells a serious lie about history as serious and dangerous as Holocaust denial.  Yet such academic work and the belief of it plays a vital role in constructing our indigenous fascism which has had throughout our history and has enormous power today - the House of Representatives and Supreme Court are dominated by it right now - white supremacy.  The flip side of that is the racist, sexist, hetero-sexist romance of the founding of the country, the development of it, the antebellum South, "the noble lost cause," "the west" and even such absurd variations as the "rugged independence of New England Yankees," (is there any region of the country that doesn't claim they're the home of "rugged independence"?  Those are all unrealistic, and damaging non-realities that inform our imaginations of the country and the place of those we stupidly consider unlike ourselves.  The role that regionalism and ginned up regional resentment plays in our endangerment is a related issue.  The scribbling classes have caused more harm in that than helped, if they hadn't, it would have greatly diminished instead of become more exacerbated, just like all of those other things.  And on towards the most powerful expressions of that, such as the hagiographic bull-shit "biography" of Alexander Hamilton that got turned into that rap and boogie musical that so seriously lied about him, turning one of the foremost enemies of equality and democracy into a heroic figure for the mid-brow and lower.  

And I do insist that you add to academic stuff, popular and entertainment writing and productions to that and add the damage those do to Women, People of Color, LGBTQ People and so many others. So many Americans get what they imagine they know about such things from fictitious TV and movie writing, song and dance musical comedy, garbage "historical" novels and such crap gets People elected to offices and, from there, appointed to courts.  I'd bet that fewer than one in a thousand Americans who consume such garbage on TV and in other garbage media would have ever read an academic non-fiction work of any kind.

If "free speech" absolutism, if "free press" absolutism were going to produce a more perfect union, economic justice, equal justice under law, domestic tranquility, . . . that would have happened by now.  Instead we are all seriously in danger of an overtly fascist government under Trumpian  Republican-fascism as the "civil liberties" lawyers preen in their purity and rake in the donations and the corporations and billionaires have far more "speech" and virtually all of the "press" to themselves.  Don't forget the role of the "civil liberties" industry in the Buckley v Valeo decision which declared money to be "speech" and, so, created the most incredible reallocation of "speech" and the most potent of that, in the media, to those with the most money.  I have no doubt that donations of thanks came their way from those so obscenely endowed.  The media has been constantly sandbagging the only President we have between us and that for the past two and a half years, after they witnessed the most nearly successful insurrection against the United States since the Civil War.

Given what the history of the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry has resulted in, the ability of the media to lie about Democratic politicians and liberals and civil rights activists, minority groups, Women, etc.  The declaration that "money is speech" in Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United opening up dark money and, so the direct interference with American democracy by billionaires foreign and domestic as seen in 2016 and all subsequent election cycles, has resulted in a myriad of other such dangers, probably the most serious dangers to American democracy in our history,  I don't think the friggin' "civil libertarians" care what they bring as long as the donations keep going in and they can present themselves as ersatz heroes, just as that monumental liar and truth suppressor Lillian Hellman did with the help of one of those ersatz heroes.  

I have seen through the slogans of "civil liberties" and see that, by and large, AND IN THE TOTAL RESULTS OF THE "CIVIL LIBERTIES" INDUSTRY that they have been most effectively a force for furthering our most dangerous form of fascism, that which has been embedded in the United States since before its founding, all of those various indigenous fascisms.  

Their insistence of striving for from some daffy notion of "even handed" "objective" "fair" letting all opinions flourish and seeing which side wins, instead of the only legitimate goal for egalitarian democratic governance, equality FOR PEOPLE, of the ability of us to be governed by a government BASED ON A REALISTICALLY INFORMED VOTING POPULATION, and to the establishment and perpetuation of egalitarian democracy, economic justice, a decent, safe life for everyone couldn't possibly be more of a habit of those with privilege.  It's such a stupidly legitimate thing, "even handedness" a "level playing field" "impartiality" but only if you're dishonest enough to deny that there is no such even condition, no level field, and the nature of the legal apparatus could not be more partial to those with the wealth and privilege

Let me ask, who would have been the worse if the ideas of Nazism had successfully been suppressed in Germany in the 1920s and 30s?  Who would have been worse off if the calls for genocide had been entirely suppressed in the 1990s?   I can tell you who would have been better off if the Bill Clinton administration had ignored the doctrine of "free speech-press" absolutism and destroyed the radio tower of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines as they were broadcasting encouragement to commit genocide and announcing the hiding places of those who were being murdered, those who were being murdered.   I have every confidence that if Bill Clinton had taken that opportunity to do the right thing, the ACLU style "civil libertarians" would have been besides themselves as they sat on their asses on North American in perfect, privileged white-collar safety.

I mentioned those prerequisites of egalitarain democracy that appear nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights and hardly matter to our "justice system,"  adequate food, drinkable water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, the right to a good education, . . . That those are left out is not only a glaring inadequacy of our Constitutional notions and, also, our law, they are symptomatic of the kind of privilege that those who wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those who were permitted to vote for it - the small minority of even those who were legally eligible to vote in a ratification process that was as rigged as anything the Republican-fascists do to our elections today.  That they neglected to specify that there is a right to tell the truth but there is no right to lie, that People who are slandered and libeled and the subject of whipped up mob action and attack have a right to their reputation and safety is due, no doubt, to their own knowledge that they and those they cared about were not in serious danger of the sort that People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ and members of other minority groups live under their entire conscious lives.  Of course it wouldn't have occurred to the rich, white, almost exclusively Protestant men who gave us the inadequate 18th century Constitution and Bill of Rights, the 19th century men who put most of the amendments to it in that those things were far more important than their abbreviated slogans of "free speech" and "free press" which has been used to destroy the lives and rights of scores of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans throughout our history.

I really do mean it when I say that I despise the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry.  I am entirely sincere and I've repeatedly said why I went from a dolt who donated money to them to, after the Skokie case, opposing them.  I've done a lot of reading about them and the consequences of their activities, their seedier alliances with some of the most dangerous industries and individuals and corporations in our country, their advocacy for those who, being part of that long and successful tradition of indigenous American fascism, unsurprisingly succeed where the long and hard struggle for equality and Civil Rights is continually thwarted under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  That struggle and temporary success, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court, other courts, often with "civil liberties" briefs on behalf of wealth, power and white supremacy,  through elections in which those for whom the loudest, most frequent lies told and peddled through the "free press," again with ACLU style advocacy on their sice, win and install Republican-fascists, Quisling Democrats.  That pattern is long enough in the United States to tell us some important things about what's wrong with our system.  The "civil liberties" advocacy of the ALCU is a glaring example of how those impediments will always produce that result, under the Constitution, under the Bill of Rights, under "the rule of law" under the mythology that the "civil liberties" industry was set up as a bulwark to American liberty while it does the bidding of corporations and fascists and Nazis to flourish and expand till now, when they tell us that a Trump has the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater and to escape consequences for himself when the intended and entirely predictable results happen.   

How stupid could those Ivy League lawyers be?  Or how insouciantly enabling of those results that crush equality?   How much stupider are liberals to continue to support it?   
 
* Reading this over it reminded me of the time I read about a judge who said the hardest thing he had ever had to do on the bench was to give a prison sentence to "a young man from a good family,"  by which he meant someone like him, like his family.  It makes you wonder how many kids unlike him and his social class he'd sent to prison without a second thought or even with great edification and job satisfaction. 

Update:  Simple Simps Says: 

"And on towards the most powerful expressions of that, such as the hagiographic bull-shit "biography" of Alexander Hamilton that got turned into that rap and boogie musical that so seriously lied about him, turning one of the foremost enemies of equality and democracy into a heroic figure for the mid-brow and lower. "

SHORTER SPARKY: "LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RISE OF FASCISM IN THE UNITED STATES!!!"

I don't know what's sadder, that you actually believe this shit or that you're so predictable about peddling it at the drop of a hat.

Well, I did stipulate "and lower."   No, he's responsible for a seriously wrong piece of seriously misleading B-Way musical tripe.  Ron Chernow wrote the inadequate biography he used.   A novel about real figures in history is bound to be dishonest, a movie even more so, probably a musical is about the most probable to entirely distort history, and I am including opera.  Theatrical treatment of history is probably far more dangerous than an inadequate book treatment,  it was one of the things I learned to my horror at Eschaton that even people with PhD's were likely to stupidly assume that plays written about actual history was, you know, actual history.  Derbes and Gromit shocked me when they said that Inherit the Wind was based on history when it totally distorted the history of the Scopes trial.   And they're miles and miles ahead of a pop music, uh, . . . "scholar" such as yourself.

Update 2:   Simple Simps Says, Again. 

You're so right, Sparky. It only Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice hadn't written EVITA, Argentina would be an idyllic liberal democracy today.

 I post these just so some newcomer who hasn't seen him in inaction will believe me if I mention him.

Simps gets upset when I diss the commercial entertainment industry.   Even resorting to an idiotic defense of Donald and Vankie's favoritest musical of all times, I don't remember how many times Trump claimed they went on daddy daughter dates to see it together.   I think it gave both of them ideas, well stupid "ideas" are ideas of a sort, that they might not have had if they hadn't seen it. 

How Twisted Is It?

A Friend Of Mine suggested that I google "chastity" and see what comes up.   Mostly, none of it was chastity and none of it was chaste.  Especially on Youtube.

I haven't been so surprised since shortly after going online I innocently googled "bears" and what came up were not bears.   And I'd known about "bears" already.

Truly, there is nothing that can't be turned into a sexual fetish, even abstaining from sex can be.   People are strange. 

Wishing For A Low Overhead Halloween And Its Charms

Update:  RMJ does a much better post for the day.

I USED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN before it became seriously big business.  It was trick-o-treating, we never did that in our family.   After the ladies of the Sodality in my town stopped having their low-overhead kids Halloween party, we mostly just had the parties at school, I never dressed up in a costume for it I don't think any of my siblings did, either.  But it was a bit of harmless fun, seeing some of the cleverer though never elaborate costumes people dressed in.  One I recall was probably the least intelligent boy in my second-grade class had a paper rocket ship costume with just his face and arms outside of it.  It didn't last more than a few minutes, sort of like a rocket.  I was glad for his cleverness, maybe the height of that in his life. 

It was fun to see the strange cookys and things that kids brought in from home.  Our mother didn't do elaborate cookys, pumpkin cut outs with candy corn for eyes and nose.   I remember in an early grade one of the girls proudly brought in the quite burned ones she'd made "all by herself"  I remember eating one out of politeness and thinking it actually wasn't that bad. 

Now it's all commercialized, house decorations were probably the thing that killed it off for me.  Though adult Halloween parties took away a lot of the charm of it before then.  Horror movies, blah!   Hollywood getting involved in anything is a charm killer.   Halloween should be in person, no-frills.   Of course, now, children get stuffed with candy year-round, every day.   Hearing how much they collect today makes me wonder how non-special that is.   I remember the townies bringing in their candy the next day,  I don't remember feeling deprived.  

I think I'll go out and look at the moon late tonight, maybe walk through our local cemetery, maybe I'll leave a muffin out as a soul cake.  Something with seeds so the animals will eat it.  Then I'll celebrate All Saints and All Souls days.   Not the Day of the Dead, that's going the way of American Halloween.  

Update:  Simps rises from his crypt:

"Horror movies, blah! Hollywood getting involved in anything is a charm killer." Jeebus, Sparky, could you be any more predictable? Or be more of a joyless, emotionally crippled asshole?

Stupy, grow up.   You've gone from puberty to senility without any interval of adulthood in between.  

The ACLU is about the worst bargain American liberals have ever bought into - Another Answer

SO YOU WANT MORE EVIDENCE that the "civil liberties" racket is the game of affluent white men who went to elite training grounds of privilege and making stupid arguments on their behalf?  How about the three who wrote the ACLU brief saying that it would be terrible, just terrible, if judges didn't keep Trump from inciting violence, threatening witnesses and court staff and polluting the jury pool?

Brett Max Kaufman - Stanford University and the University of Texas School of Law

Ben Wizner - Harvard College, Harvard University, NYU School of Law

Brian Hauss - Yale University and Harvard Law School

In the NPR story on the ACLU siding with a man whose words are known to incite his cult to threaten and intimidate and commit violence it said,

The ACLU team acknowledged a "serious risk" that Trump could inspire his political supporters to violence. But their court filing said the First Amendment doesn't give the judge license to gag him.

"The mere fact that others have threatened actions against trial participants after hearing Defendant's words is not enough," the ACLU said.

Seriously, how stupid can you be to graduate from their schools?   How stupid are judges and "justices" to buy their bullshit?   If they were to argue the famous case that Holmes jr. imagined, a man shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, they'd claim that he was blameless and wasn't responsible for all those people who trampled others to death to escape.  That he had a "First Amendment" right to say whatever he wanted to.  That IS how stupid their claim is.
 

In short, until someone gets maimed or killed, they've got no problem with a situation that risks the maiming and killing of witnesses, court staff and others and peddling lies to the jury pool.  AND THEY HOLD THE ONE WHO INCITED THEM HAS NO CULPABILITY IN INCITING THEM.   No doubt that if Trump's goons were brought up on charges, once Trump's known attempts to incite them were brought to trial, the same ACLU assholes would demand that a link to Trump be proved beyond any possible rational standard of judging that to have happened.

"Free speech" and "freedom of the press" is an ideological absolute with these assholes, the ACLU and the "civil liberties" racket have learned they can sucker liberals with those slogans and they can get big money from the media and others with a financial interest in being allowed to lie with impunity and push even the most dangerous lies.  They have no problem with the weaponization of the media, the internet, hate-talk, etc. because allowing that is in their financial and professional interest and they figure it's no skin off of them.  That's the case with all of these "civil liberties" outfits.

Their ass-covering with allegedly aiding civil rights efforts and other such things which are of vital interest to liberals is more than wiped out by their other advocacy, especially their enabling exactly what they will smarmily admit is a "serious risk" even as that risk has resulted in more than half a century of fascist ascendancy in the United States, the reinvigoration of our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, its allies in imported ideologies such as Nazism, and Republican-fascism WHICH HAS ALREADY STACKED THE SUPREME COURT WITH THOSE WHO ARE DESTROYING ALL OF THE PROGRESS MADE TOWARDS EQUALITY IN THOSE FIFTY YEARS OF "FREE SPEECH" "FREE PRESS" ABSOLUTISM.  And much of what has been done since the Civil War.  

The ACLU is about the worst bargain American liberals have ever bought into.  Its Ivy-League and Ivy-equivalent lawyers and staff aren't so stupid as to not realize what they enable and support with their work and they certainly haven't missed that their clients are the ones who have done so much to damage minorities, Women, LGBTQ+ People, the environment, etc.  They simply don't care because their ideology and pose of Bill of Rights purity matters more to them than the lives and rights of People, the environment, and everything else their advocacy has damaged.  It's clear in this latest filing THAT THEY DON'T CARE FOR THE INTEGRITY OF THE RULE OF LAW, EVEN IN THE FACE OF A NEARLY SUCCESSFUL FASCIST PUTSCH AGAINST THE VERY CONSTITUTION THEY CLAIM TO REVERE.

That's how truly vile the "civil liberties" racket is.  Liberals should dump it and declare the truth, they're on the side of the oligarchs and plutocrats, which is no surprise because so many of them are oligarchs, themselves.

Natural Selection And The Golden Calf of Republican Fascism In All Its Vulgar Materialism - A Response

NOTE: First the short answer.  Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac, he's the golden-calf of Republican-fascism.  The topic of evolution is a mere side-show.
CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE MIKE JOHNSON DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS

THE ACCUSATION that because I reject Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, that leads me to have something in common with the fascist in sheep's clothing, Mike Johnson, the unanimous choice of the Republican-fascist caucus of the House of Representatives to be Speaker of the House is absurd.   I have never in my life not accepted that evolution is the most rational explanation of the diversity of life on Earth as indicated in the fossil and geological record.  Later the study of genetics added enormously to that conclusion.  Those show that species evolve from earlier no longer extant species at a time later species weren't there.  As far as I'm concerned, that somewhat over-rated cultural holding is well seen as being a fact and no longer a theory.  Though I think its position in the culture is absurdly elevated due to its role in the ideological struggle between a position I reject, materialistic atheism and scientism on one hand and biblical fundamentalism, which I reject just as much.  I hold that much of the clap trap of conjecture and Just-so story telling around the topic of evolution is as absurd as biblical fundamentalism and 6 day creationism and no more scientific, even though much of that is held to be orthodox science and taught in universities around the world.

Having done what you haven't, read widely in the literature of evolution, I know that not only was Darwinism the origin of eugenics - as I proved in those many posts I have written on that topic - but that it is also not a particularly good scientific theory, based as it is in an ideological economic speculation that has little to no demonstration in physical observation or accurate measurement and which included a large component of self-interest among those who originated all of it.  That lack of observation and measurement means that scientific method can't be applied to theories about it.  On top of that, no human being has ever seen speciation occur which means science cannot actually study speciation, despite the claims to that effect.  The act of speciation has left no unambiguous record of how it happened of even that it occurred in the scanty fossil record.  All of my belief in that is a conjecture based on the evidence even as the evidence doesn't show that's what happened.   No one has even the scantiest knowledge of how it happened and may be happening right now - if science and its products don't kill off all of life before new species can evolve.  No one knows if it happens in one way as conventional Darwinists insist on, or in many ways which may mix and combine in who knows how many ways, no one knows what the actual bases on which it happens are or how large that range of bases is.

Darwin's theory was based not on science but on a particularly brutal and obviously self-interested theory of late 18th and early 19th century economics, that of the rather stupid and dishonest Thomas Malthus*, taken up by the aristocratic Charles Darwin and used to make up a story of how speciation is supposed to have happened based on the extremely scanty fossil evidence available to him, the often naive and perhaps as often wrong interpretation of physical observation of living organisms, a complete lack of knowledge of genetics or epigenetics or those most recent discoveries of molecular biology that old-timey biologists get in a lather about when more up to date scientists like Dennis Nobel and James Shapiro insist on talking about them.  On top of that Darwin chose as his great demonstration of natural selection the human practice of breeding animals and plants WHICH IS IN NO WAY NATURAL BUT ARTIFICIAL SELECTION AND WHICH HAS NEVER, ONCE, RESULTED IN SPECIATION IN WHICH THE OFFSPRING COMPRISE A NEW SPECIES.   There is no demonstrable connection between human, artificial selective breeding and culling and what happens in nature.

Those biologists I've greatly admired, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and their close colleagues have rightly called the bases of what Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism,"  Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, "Just-so Stories" while ignoring that the mother of all Just-so Stories is natural selection, itself.  Even as both of them were conventional Darwinists of a less fundamentalist variety.  

When you look at the theory of natural selection with open eyes and a critical mind and no professional or ideological motives, the reason it was adopted in mid to late 19th and 20th century science probably had a lot more to do with the class which professional biologists belonged to or sought to join in their professional choice, their race and gender AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL PREFERENCES AND CLASS ECONOMIC INTERESTS than it did the integrity of the theory as science.  You can add the interest that biologists and their allies had in pretending they had a universal theory to explain one of the great mysteries of life such as it was believed physics had and chemistry was developing, I will point out with far greater success, durability and integrity than biology has proved to have.  

Its retention in the post-war period is in every way a product of all of those, especially to promote materialist-atheist-scientism, even as science has moved far past that theory being held up as supreme.  I think its retention is entirely ideological and self-interested, at this point and I think it is a serious danger, not only to scientific progress but, as the "Darwinian economists" such as advised Trumpian-Republican and Swedish policy demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic , they still are getting people killed in large numbers.

In terms of what Darwin, his inner circle such as Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and such as W. R. Gregg claimed and were taken seriously on with often horrendous legal and political consequences, many a modern day Darwinist would have never been born if they'd had their way because their science claimed our ancestors were degenerate, either on a class basis or on a basis of their ethnicity or on their health.  I know some of mine were driven to the verge of death by Malthusian class policy and held to be degenerate, presented by Darwin as that in his books.  If one of my great-great-great grandmothers had died in the British death camps, the work house she was interned in, I wouldn't' be here to annoy you. Which would be a shame.  And mine were all Northern Europeans living in Britain and its occupied lands.  Entire races of humans were on their death lists.  We don't know if those who may have been born to those killed or forcibly sterilized in the name of Darwinian fitness as Darwin and those others advocated may have bought into the theory that marked them as fated to be biologically dysgenic and a danger to the human species as a whole, once they'd had a chance at education and entering into the profession of science.  We don't know if others who were shunted off into inferior educations on the later day applications of Darwinism may have, even though they didn't get cut off from the future in the same way, depriving Darwinism of many a true believer.  Many People of Color, Turks, Russian and Polish Jews, the Irish, the poor in general were all held by Darwin and mainstream Darwinism to have been biologically inferior and their removal from the human species desirable along with those whose only crimes were to be malnourished, ill-housed and sick.  I'm not exaggerating in that, read The Descent of Man and mainstream Darwinist science by those accepted to have constituted official science if you think I am.  

Mike Johnson is clearly a dishonest, pseudo-Christian, Republican-fascist and liar.  He is a white-collar anti-democrat who participated in the soft-handed side of the most serious putsch against American government in its history, one which attempted to put not only the former Confederate states under an anti-democratic government but the entire country.  His statements blaming mass gun murder on the teaching of evolution is entirely a product of that ideological struggle between materialist-atheism and his own brand of vulgar materialism, oddly coming out in the same place, in the end.  

That it is an irrational lie peddled in the same dishonesty as TV advertising and hate-talk radio is to absolutely be expected.  His voting record in the House is eugenic, Darwinist in its consequences just as that of the "white evangelicals" generally is.  Other than in mere words, it is in no way in opposition to the atheist materialism of Darwinism, it is just as Malthusian even if it doesn't care much about evolution -which has no practical utility that interests them - and so has no problem denying that EVOLUTION (as distinguished from natural selection) is the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, a diversity which he and his policy have every intention of sacrificing to the profits of the rich, the white, the male and the privileged, the very basis of Malthusianism and, so, Darwinism after it.  Johnson may not be so crude or impolitic, or scientific as to draw up explicit death lists, but he has them, CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE HE DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS.   His actions demonstrate that whereas his lying mouth doesn't say it.

While I find it somewhat interesting what archeologists and paleontologists dig up and, sometimes, their story-telling about that, am even conditionally convinced of some of it, I don't think the topic of evolution is really nearly as important as a good self-righteous, college-graduate is supposed to.  I don't think it is central to most of the biological science and much of the most important of that.  I don't think there's any particular virtue to be found in the topic and am skeptical of its practical utility.  

The claim that knowing we are a product of evolution makes People more humane to other living beings and appreciative of the diversity of nature and the environment is absurd.  That is best seen by those who are bound by that belief the most strongly.   Biologists are among the most brutal People I've ever encountered, certainly within academia. The hundreds of millions, probably billions of animals and plants sacrificed by professional "life" scientists in the most dubious of commercial testing, often pseudo-scientific scientific studies, the casual brutality of scientists who kill and often maim before killing sentient animals proves that Darwinism and even a more up-to-date and honest biological education doesn't make them more humane.  The recently demonstrated folly of believing that mammals are an effective and accurate model of human physiology and biology, sometimes leading to very misleading claims about the efficacy and safety of commercial products and industrial action may indicate that all of that killing and torturing of animals to have been as pseudo-scientific as anything in the annals of modern historical snark.  

I cannot recall, once, in their breezy talk about all of this killing, which they presented as an inevitable consequences of "the law of nature," that is the theory of natural selection, that they advocated as science NOT KILLING PEOPLE.   Darwin, once, after Frances Cobbe presented her essay pointing out the moral consequences of a belief in natural selection gave one double-speaking passage in regard to that in The Descent of Man, the rest of the book scientifically arguing against any such preservation of life and repeatedly arguing for the boon for the survivors that the deaths of those deemed inferior as solid science.  It's clear from the history of Darwinism in science and in public policy and law that no one took his disingenuous ass-covering remark seriously. 

The belief in evolution certainly didn't make Thomas Huxley more humane as he eagerly anticipated what he predited would be the genocidal extermination of American Black People by what he held were the superior white population, once emancipation supposedly eliminated their economic utility to their "superiors."  It didn't make Darwin more humane as he made similar claims about the melioristic effects of genocidal extermination of entire races around the world in The Descent of Man and their replacement by Northern White Europeans.  It didn't make perhaps Darwin's favorite supporting scientist, the German Ernst Haeckel any less inclined to call for the murder of a whole list of People he held to be both biologically inferior and dysgenic to the population as a whole. As I mentioned Stephen Jay Gould rightly called his published and widely influential science, proto-Nazi.  Nazi racial, social and military theory was entirely based on a Darwinian view of evolution. 

Darwinism has led to a situation in the humanities in which the philosophical specialty of "ethics" has become a contest in drawing up lists of who it's OK to kill or let die of neglect.  That is humanism as practiced by those among such humanists who are conventional Darwinist evolutionists.  In that they are recapitulating the work of Haeckel,  Galton, Huxley, Pearson,  and others in a continuous list of names that gets you right up into those of the Nazi scientific establishment. I've brought that list right up to today in many posts, names of living credentialed scientists who are quoted by American and British right-wing scribblers and politicians to support their brutal policy choices and as published in mainstream magazines.  As noted in many of those posts, including the one I reposted the other day, natural selection, Darwinism, identifies DEATH as a supreme engine of human progress, whether by neglect or by outright murder.   That the enormous expansion of the acceptance of evolution led to the scientific field** of eugenics WHICH IS ALWAYS PRESENTED AS A HUMAN BENEFIT FOR THE SURVIVORS OF THE HURD CULLING! is certainly due to the theory of natural selection which still dominates the science of biology and every other field that attached itself to it.  

That wasn't inevitable, it is quite possible that a theory of evolution not based in a melioristic and brutal Malthusian economic ranking of differential financial value may not have produced eugenics.  Though I doubt that such a theory would have been so quickly accepted by the class of men who ruled science, those who accepted Darwinism.  Some such theories, today, are most stridently resisted by today's Darwinists.   The overarching framing of evolution and the holding that all life is related certainly didn't produce a more humane and moral view of life, not even human life.  But, bypassing the topic of biological evolution,  the Malthusianism, the capitalism, the wealthy class basis of Republican-fascism, even when it falsely claims that it is consonant with Christianity - WHICH IT CERTAINLY IS NOT - is no better.  They having the same power now that eugenicists had before, they are far more of a danger today.  That is built on the indigenous form of American fascism, white supremacy which Thomas Huxley believed was an expression of Darwinian biological superiority.   They are merely a different branch of the same amoral and cultural evolution that materialist-atheism is, Darwinism being a major part of that in the most recent part of the modern period.  The fact that species evolve did absolutely nothing to make that better, you need far more than science to lead you to something better than that. Science is incapable of that just as economics and secular legalism are.

Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac. Both believe entirely in the economic and financial ranking of lives instead of Gospel equality.  Jesus Christ said it, you cannot serve both God and Mammon.  Despite what he claims, Mike Johnson serves Mammon.  Every member of the House Republican Caucus does, their voting record proves it, their Christianity is a fraud right down to the last one.  I believe the Gospel of Jesus and take the Epistles and Acts seriously.  That results in the most radical thing there is, no materialistic ideological category can come close and the vulgar materialism of a Mike Johnson doesn't even try to.  I'm sure he would hold it is heretical and, if he could, he would violently suppress it.  

* Decades before Darwin used Malthus to invent natural selection the radical English democrat William Cobbett pointed out that Malthus  advocating that the poor be left to starve away under "the law of nature" instead of helped proved how stupid he was because if the "law of nature" instead of the artificial laws of England and Britain ruled the poor would have dispossessed the British wealthy class of their wealth in a matter of hours and the entire basis of Malthus's economics would be obliterated.  That has always been an underlying fear of those with wealth going back to when Pharaoh was having his nightmares at the end of Genesis, it is the fear of those with wealth or the fantasy they will become wealthy which leads to all of the degrees of gangster rule as opposed to egalitarian democracy in which all are truly equal.  

** Science is whatever scientists of any time accept as science.  The inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton was certainly one of the most eminent scientists of his time and the innovator of many fields still embedded into science today.  Eugenics is still promoted within science, though not generally admitted to be that.  It's as current in science as 6-day creationism is in religion, though with far more dangerous effects.   If religion is answerable for bad religion - as it certainly does answer for it, I doubt there is more exigent criticism of biblical fundamentalism than within religion - then science can't get off the hook for bad science.  Both are human activities founded in the choices that People make, science claims for itself a heightened ability to discern the truth from falsity, yet scientists and those who will claim, for themselves, a heightened "public understanding of science" insist that it be exempted from even that level of internal responsibility.  The often naive faith we outsiders have in science, the power given to it because it is sometimes efficacious and quite profitable makes it far more dangerous than any religion.  I have never seen a credentialed scientist kicked out of science for pushing climate-change denial for pay any more than its weaponeers and promoters of white supremacy have been.  Science is a mess as "religion" falsely considered as a coherent category is a mess.  Only science is pretended to be a unified whole as religion is mocked for its enormous diversity.  A lot of that is due to the dishonesty of academic credentialing, which is a different but related topic.  Education is a total mess, too.  Elite universities are really fucked up.