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Better watch out buddy! You're next!

RWP used to think 'The Republican War on Science' was hyperbole. He is rapidly changing his opinion. The Deutsch affair, where the Bush administration appointed a 23-year old fundamentalist college dropout to rewrite NASA web pages to make them compliant with biblical literalism, and who attempted to muzzle a senior and distinguished NASA atmospheric scientist, was a very bad sign. The embrace of the trojan horse 'intelligent design', and even unapologetic creationism, by most conservative media, was a second. Now, it appears that Free Republic, the self-styled 'premier conservative web forum', is engaged in a full scale purge of scientists, or at least those scientists who outspokenly favor evolution.

RWP himself was banned a few months ago, for demanding that the site ban a deranged nutcase who went by the name of Agamemnon (actually an unemployed fundamentalist biochemist from Connecticut), who was posting overt libel. Agamemnon has now re-registered under the username Conservative Biochemist; he and Jim Robinson, the dictator of FR, will soon be the happy recipients of 'cease and desist' letters. But this week, the pace has accelerated:

one pro-evolution poster was banned for pointing out that several quotations purportedly refuting the concept of the Separation of Church and State were in fact misrepresented. One can see why this would bother Jim Robinson, since he has himself in the past posted fake Madison quotes for the same purpose
another poster, a physicist, was banned today for questioning the sincerity of the co-pilot in the Kentucky plane crash, who had asked for prayers.
still another poster, a mathematician, was banned for the trumped up reason having two accounts; something that many if not most posters have created.

Over the last three years, FR has gone from a forum where a diverse range of conservatives and libertarians, secular and religious conservatives could debate the future of the movement, to the point where questioning even the most extreme claims of the Religious Right is cause for banning. And, of course, science challenges those claims, so science must be purged. In this respect, FR has become a microcosm of the Republican Party itself, which, unable or unwilling to carry out most of the substantive parts of the conservative agenda, despite four years of bicameral majorities, and faced with multiple foreign policy disasters, including a bloody and seemingly interminable war in Iraq, has reduced itself to empty gestures and petty assaults on the Establishment Clause, to satisfy an ever contracting base of fundamentalist Christians.

Free Republic once boasted a fair quota of conservative thinkers and intellectuals, and had a measurable impact on the 2004 election, It has become a cultural zoo of the worst sterotypes of conservatism: proudly ignorant, woefully illiterate, violently abusive biblical literalists. To everything there is a season, and the summer of Free Republic has turned to late fall. Requiescat in pace.