The grill is blue, therefore the racism is true

Creationist logic is soaking into the general discourse, I’m sorry to say. As we’ve all heard, Donald Trump declared that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and some people have been desperately trying to validate that. Among their ranks we have Chris Rufo, the professional racist, destroyer of universities, and flailing idiot trained in the heart of the Discovery Institute, who attempts to mimic skeptical reasoning in a post titled…

The Cat Eaters of Ohio
The establishment media called it a racist myth, but is it?

Yes. Yes it is.

He’s going to get to the bottom of this story.

So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.

“Not exactly” is doing a lot of work here. To translate, he’s saying “not even close to what Trump described,” which he interprets as reasonable doubt that any rebuttals are valid.

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”

I watched the video. It’s true, there are live cats on camera, and there is a barbecue grill, and there is something unidentifiable cooking on the grill, and there is a man vocally accusing them of grilling cats. That’s it. One ambiguous video yanked off of TikTok. That’s Rufo’s evidence.

He does go a significant step further, and he or someone he’s associated with contacted the creator of the video, and even visited the neighborhood to ask questions. It’s a significant effort, but all he’s going to get out of it is a lot of irrelevant details. As any creationist knows, piling on random detail is an adequate substitute for actually confirming a hypothesis.

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

Point of order: there has been no evidence presented that it was a cat on the grill. Having the initial accuser repeat the accusation adds nothing.

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

So, not a Haitian. Telling us the country of origin of the accused does not in any way confirm that they were eating cats — we keep drifting further and further away from the initial claim — but it does contradict the story we were told.

But hey, people from Africa, people from a Caribbean island, they’re all the same. They’re black. Is Rufo trying to establish that yes, it sure is a racist myth?

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

At this point, we’ve lost the plot. Now we’ve got the testimony of someone in the neighborhood saying that she had a neighbor, not necessarily the same person as the one accused in the video, was from Africa. In Rufo’s mind, this is a connection sufficient to establish guilt, and he had a knife, and he was reputed to have hunted for meat in the neighborhood.

Somebody had a blue grill, the same color as the grill in the video, therefore they must have been cooking cats.

There are many cats wandering about, further evidence. I’m going to have to confess: there are many feral and pet cats living in my neighborhood. I’m going to be in big trouble if ever I’m accused of cat-eating, because they’ll be able to point to a random cat strolling by and announce “A-ha! Opportunity! Therefore, guilty!”

Rufo imagines himself a reasonable man, so he offers a reasonable interpretation.

To be clear: this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.

It does not confirm any particularity of Trump’s statement. It’s a different city and a different nationality. Notice how he now segues from a video of something indefinite on a grill to a definitive statement that “cats alone were on the grill,” something that has not been established by this investigation. The question he should be asking is — what was Trump’s source for this garbled, ugly claim? I know, he’s just going to say it was people on television, but what ought to be engaging Rufo is not whether there is some thin, tenuous thread of circumstance that can be attached post-hoc to Trump’s claim, but what was the actual basis for the claim?

Also, the fact checkers never insisted that this has never happened. Every account I’ve read points out that there was an isolated instance of a mentally ill person eating a cat, so right away there’s an awareness that it’s entirely possible that there have been individual cases of such incidents. The expression of racism arises from the fact that Rufo and Trump and a whole wing of conservatives are flatly accusing an entire group of people of reprehensible behavior on the basis of the flimsiest evidence. It arises from the fact that Rufo can blithely equate Congolese with Haitian.

It takes only a single exception, however, to falsify a hypothesis, and the logical next step, for any honest broker, is to ask if it is happening more often, and elsewhere. It is not implausible. Many developing nations, including the Congo and Haiti, have traditions of animal sacrifice or consumption of what Americans would consider household pets. And if this occurred in Dayton, where the migrant population is relatively small, it could be going on down the road in Springfield, where it is relatively much larger.

Keep in mind that the hypothesis that Rufo is falsifying is the idea that no one has ever eaten a cat, which is both trivially false and a hypothesis that no one has proposed. An honest broker would not suggest that this is the premise in contention; the concern is that it has become a Republican talking point that an entire large community of immigrants is habitually preying on household pets in Ohio.

This is simply not true.

You also cannot extrapolate from one poorly documented possible case in Dayton to conclude that it must be happening on a larger scale in Springfield. You also don’t get to plop down the claim that pet-eating is endemic in Congo and Haiti without a source and without evidence, trusting only in the assumed racist bias that of course, black people everywhere engage in behaviors that good, civilized white people deplore.

Rufo has managed to confirm only that a) he’s racist as fuck, and b) has no grasp of elementary logic. It’s about what I’d expect from a creationist fool and professional hatemonger. How can we doubt that Haitians are eating your cats if he has photographic evidence that blue barbecue grills exist?

I missed out on the action

Surprise! Russian propaganda outlets have been funneling lots of cash into some sympathetic YouTubers…amazing amounts of money. They had a fake figurehead named “Grigoriann” who recruited these commentators to churn out videos that expressed the views that Russia likes.

Prosecutors said one of the Tenet founders began soliciting two commentators for work on behalf of “Grigoriann” around February 2023. One of the personalities, described as “Commentator-1,” said he would need $5 million annually “for him to be interested” in creating videos for the fake persona, Grigoriann. The other, identified as “Commentator-2,” needed $100,000 per weekly episode “to make it worth his while,” according to the indictment.

The two commentators eventually entered into contracts, prosecutors said. The contract for Commentator-1 required four weekly videos that he would host and would be livestreamed by Tenet Media in exchange for $400,000 per month and a $100,000 signing bonus. Commentator-2 agreed to provide weekly videos for $100,000 apiece, the indictment states.

OK, I’ll make videos for a mere $10K per week. No problem. I could commit to making that my full-time job for only half a million per year, although I’d also willingly accept $5 million, like those bozos did.

Maybe the problem is that I don’t express views that are favorable to Moscow. Or have 1 or 2 million followers on YouTube.

The well-paid commentators have been identified as Tim Pool and either Dave Rubin or Benny Johnson (doesn’t matter which is which, they’re all kind of indistinguishable right-wing turds). If you don’t recognize those names, good for you — they are the schlockiest, dumbest, most dishonest people on YouTube.

There’s something wrong at the core of YouTube, because have you noticed that it’s always the worst people who float to the top of that medium?

“Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Remember Robert Morris? Pastor at one of the largest megachurches in the country, Gateway Church, that draws in a 100,000 suckers every week? Or did you manage to erase him from your memory after learning that he was guilty of molesting a 12 year old girl? If so, good for you, and stop reading because I’m going to remind you of the man.

There have been developments.

Last week, a pastor who oversaw all of Gateway’s campuses departed amid an undisclosed “moral issue,” becoming the latest in a series of changes for the church: The cancellation of its annual conference. The departure of Morris’ successor. The renaming of its Houston campus and an exodus of worshippers.

An “exodus of worshippers” sounds great, and is what I’d expect: empty megachurches as parishioners wake up and realize that it’s all a sham run by con artists and that they can do better with their life than getting their morality from a pedophile. I’m relieved to see that some people did exactly that.

For Emily High, the 17 years she spent as a church member came to a halt because she felt betrayed, she said.

“It’s anger, it’s all the range of emotions,” High told WFAA. “Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Yes! Except…Ms High represents a minority.

The church has seen a decrease of 17% to 19% in weekend services attendance, a church spokesperson told CNN.

I can do math. That means there are still 80,000 fools and tools shuffling into those churches every weekend. The Christian grift continues!

The ghost of Gish

It’s depressing how much the right wing of politics owes to creationists. Madhusudan Katti speaks a well-recognized truth.

Veterans of the evolution wars have been alarmed at how some of the figures driving the antiscience and anti-intellectual agenda of the modern Republican Party emerged from the creationist movement. A prime example is Manhattan Institute’ Christopher Rufo, who rose from Seattle’s Discovery Institute (birthplace of “intelligent design”) to become a leading conservative intellectual; his attacks on universities have taken on dangerous proportions, linked to attacks on academic freedom in states like Florida. Such mastery of the Gish gallop manifests not just on the debate stage these days, but in the op-ed pages of major newspapers falsely demonizing “critical race theory,” decrying DEI and getting prominent university presidents fired. Rufo and like-minded advocates know how to flood the zone with a steady barrage of disinformation until, as the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt noted, “people no longer can believe anything”, losing their “capacity to act” or “to think and to judge”, and “with such a people, you can then do what you please.”

What we once thought of as an obscure reference to weird creationist tactics has become common parlance. Just about everyone knows what a Gish Gallop is, and every time a Republican steps up to a lectern we can trust them to deploy it. We have seen Trump use it; even his rallies are a random, scattershot collection of confusing nonsense. Sharks and electric batteries, anyone? Crowd sizes at his past events? Hannibal Lecter? It’s madness.

Ask one of those veterans of the evolution wars what we should do when confronted with a galloping Gish. The first bit of advice is the simplest.

The best advice for scientists, honed after years of fighting creationist and climate-denial drivel, is to eschew fake debates on stages as simply lending megaphones to liars.

Unfortunately, politicians are trapped by convention and have to do debates. So, specifically, what should someone do when compelled to participate in a debate?

Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, the next debate, scheduled for September 10, will likely feature Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who better be prepared to counter Trump’s Gish gallop more forcefully. She will face a well-practiced con artist and loud dissembler who will flood the zone with enough falsehoods to outshout the former prosecutor and senator. (Speaking as an evolutionary scientist, there are no prizes for guessing which side of the evolution-creation debate these two candidates fall on, either.) When it’s her turn to respond, Harris should turn the tables on Trump by calling him out as a liar without bothering to refute each lie and refocus the audience on her own message. When asked how she might respond if Trump started stalking her on stage, Harris said she would turn around and ask “Why are you being so weird?” Indeed, her campaign has already leaned into this strategy to highlight and mock just how extreme the Republican agenda has become. It just might see her win the next debate as well.

This is good advice for all the youtubers who get sucked into engaging with liars and fools. First, don’t. Second, if you must, focus one one thing instead of a thousand and drill down hard to expose the dumbass. Third, make it clear that your opponent is not a scientist, is not qualified to address the evidence, and is just a weird pretentious clown who is wasting everyone’s time.

Good god, I pray that my children like me a little bit

These hateful conservative weirdos are all concerned about their legacy (at least, they pretend they are), but they never stop to think that maybe their many children will reject their narrow-minded, painfully short-sighted ways. After all, their kids have seen what the parental dogma does to families first hand.

Case in point: Elon Musk’s disowned daughter, Vivian Wilson, is spilling all the tea about her horrible, absent father.

I understand your new angle is this “western values/ christian family man” thing but it’s such a weird choice. You are not a family man, you are a serial adulterer who won’t stop fucking lying about your own children. You are not a christian, as far as I’m aware you’ve never stepped foot in a church. You are not some “bastion for equality/progress”. You called arabic the “language of the enemy” when | was 6, have been sued for discrimation multiple times, and are from Apartheid South Africa.
You are not “saving the planet”, you do not give a fuck about climate change and you’re lying about multi-planetary civilization as both an excuse, and because you want to seem like the CEO from Ready Player One. I would mention the birth rate stuff, but I am not touching that weird 14-words breeder shit with a ten foot pole. You single-handedly disillusioned me with how gullible we are as a species because somehow people keep believing you for reasons that continue to evade me.

Every parent ought to live to earn the honor and respect of their children. If they can’t do that, they don’t deserve to have kids. It’s that simple.

I’ve read a few romance novels, some fantasy, and a lot of bad science fiction

I prefer all of them to loony flat earth trash.

Candace Owens tries so hard to make women who read silly romance novels sound stupid, while she pretends to be an intellectual.

Can you guys imagine being married to me? My my poor husband, he rolls over, he’s like, what are you reading? And I feel like a regular wife says something, I don’t know, maybe a love series. Nora Roberts sweeping her away. Me, on the other hand — he rolled over, he asked me and I said, oh, I’m reading a flat earth theory. And it dawned into an entire conversation. He’s like, why are you reading a flat earth theory? And I’m like, because somebody messaged me on Monect about it, and they included some links, and I’m just reading them. I don’t know. I’m just an interested person no matter what. If there’s a bunch of people that believe something, I now want to know what it is that they believe. And, of course, he pushed me on this, and he was talking about the earth curvature and science. And I said to him, listen. I’m not a flat earther. I’m not a round earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science. I have left the megachurch of science because what I have now realized is that science, what it is actually, if you think about it, is a pagan faith.

Sorry, lady, you were never a member of that “megachurch”. Witness the fact that you are bragging about taking flat earth theory seriously.

Who remembers when lots of conservatives were reliable supporters of science and engineering, and called liberals “moonbats” for their crazy hippie ideas? What happened to them, anyway? Are they all dead?

Why I left Facebook

It hurts so much when friends and family post this sort of thing.

Devout Christians have found by looking through a microscope a gene in your D and A that makes you an atheist. It’s the Satan gene what do you say to that atheists Satan made you this way so god must be real

You can’t argue with that. All you can do is close the window, delete your facebook account, send a hit squad of clowns armed with pies to Zuckerberg’s house, and resign from the human race.

If only they hadn’t made that last comment

Honestly, I could have ignored this. It’s nothing but familiar anti-trans stupidity, inventing sharp distinctions out of blurry ones, pretending overlaps in morphology don’t exist. There’s just so much of it that I don’t have the will to address it all. But that last bit…I saw red.

Male skeletons literally have more ribs than female skeletons and many other differences. Did you go to an online college?

That is simply not true. Did you go to a bible college?

America’s gain is the UK’s loss

To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed that Nigel Farage was planning to campaign for Trump in the US, so I didn’t care that he abruptly decided to leave my country and campaign for himself.

Nigel Farage on Monday announced that he would return to frontline British politics as leader of the Reform party and run for a seat in the election next month, scrapping his previously stated position of skipping the race in order to focus on supporting Donald Trump.

“I’ve changed my mind, it is allowed, you know!” Farage told a hastily arranged press conference. He said he will remain leader for the next five years in order to hold the expected Labour government to account.

Goodbye. Don’t care, you wanker. Fuck off already.

Understandably, though, his prospective constituents in Essex did have strong opinions about his reentry into their business.

Nigel Farage’s surprise campaign for the upcoming British general election got off to a sticky start Tuesday when someone chucked a milkshake in his face.

From this we get the only portrait of Nigel Farage I ever want to see.

Perfection.