Sometimes it feels like the online world is split into multiple, incompatible perceptions of reality.
This is not a new development. In fact, in the mid-aughts one man tried to create an isolated island of American christian conservative thinking by launching a website called Conservapedia. Though it was advertised as being free from the supposed liberal bias of Wikipedia, Conservapedia became a home of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and general right-wing grievances. It even launched a project to create a new English translation of the Bible that was manlier and more conservative than previous translations.
To help us understand the history of Conservapedia, we recruited our resident reddit atheist debunker, Travis. He’s going to walk us through the story of Conservpedia’s creation and show off some of the latest additions to the online encyclopedia, which is still active after 17 years.
References
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jun-19-na-schlafly19-story.html
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Night_of_the_Blunt_Knives
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/11/conservative-bible-project-liberal-conservapedia
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 231 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Conservapedia episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Sometimes, when you're online, it feels like the world is split into multiple, incompatible perceptions of reality.
This is not a new development.
In fact, in the mid-aughts, one man tried to create an isolated island of American Christian conservative thinking by launching a website called Conservapedia.
Though it was advertised as being free from the supposed liberal bias of Wikipedia, Conservapedia became a home for pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and general right-wing grievances.
It even launched a project to create a new English translation of the Bible that was manlier and more conservative than previous translations.
To help us understand the history of Conservapedia, we have recruited our resident Reddit atheist debunker, Travis, and he is going to walk us through the story of Conservapedia's creation and show off some of the latest additions to the online encyclopedia, which is still active after 17 years.
17. Cue.
17.
So yeah, this is, uh, you know, this, this actually came from a few requests of listeners,
and it was a really good idea because I actually remember when the rise of Conservapedia,
because this was basically right around the time of my interest in creationism. And this was a
big part of this weird kind of like early wrestling between different forces online,
trying to determine what exactly the online world would be used for, would be used for,
didn't know the spread a lot of nonsense ideas about pseudoscience or would it be a sort of
a bastion of rationality, you know?
I mean, he's certainly before his time. 2006 and you've already figured out that the internet is
woke and it's gone woke and the woke mind virus has taken over and we got to fight back.
Yeah, yeah. You know, a lot of this, yeah, these ideas are very, very prescient. I guess.
I guess they understood the idea that sort of the people who are trying to take control of, I guess, what were becoming the mainstream institutions of the internet, perhaps not entirely sympathetic to people who believe that the world is just a few thousand years old.
So, you know, we do complain a lot on the show about like the negative products and byproducts of the Internet.
But if I were to list one of the Internet's greatest creations, then I think, you know, Wikipedia would have to be near the top.
This is a multilingual, free encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers.
This is a site where you can quickly get an overview of just about
any subject in any domain from like pop culture to history to science and engineering and
beyond. Now obviously it's not perfect, you know, there's been controversies and
legitimate criticisms, but I think it's like the closest thing we have to this utopian vision of the
purpose of the internet where people can learn about anything they want at home for free. Yes, and I
don't have to watch like two advertisements back to back before I can scroll down to the
section on JFK's death where it says controversy.
Yeah, and I mean, I think that politically speaking it is a bit questionable because it's pretty easy to manipulate if you have the resources.
Right.
Of course.
But in general, you're right, I think, Travis.
It is kind of, you know, the closest we have, I think, to a kind of shining light on the hill.
Yeah, you know, is a really cool idea.
But back in 2006, there was one man who was less than impressed with what Wikipedia had to offer.
This man was Andrew Shafley.
He decided that Wikipedia had an unfixable liberal bias, and he aimed to create a competitor more in line with Christian, conservative values.
Conservapedia.
Now, this was a natural project for Andrew Schlafly.
Schlafly is the son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who was best known for successfully campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment of the Constitution in the 1970s.
Andrew Schlafly himself is well-educated.
He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton and then a JD from Harvard Law School in 1991.
But Andrew Shafley didn't find his calling as the founder of Conservapedia until he started teaching a group of homeschooled students history in his home of New Jersey.
Now, what started as a small group in 2002 grew into a class of dozens of students.
Does that even count as like homeschooling if you're basically putting together like a fake school?
Well, I mean, yeah, it's like, you know, he's like, I guess it's like he connected with other parents who were homeschooling and he offered to teach history.
And yeah, it wound up being a class of like 50 plus students, which, yeah, I guess ironically, he's much larger than a lot of even public school classrooms.
Yeah.
So, everything was going fine in this class until one day in 2006, a student turned in an assignment that dated the year of events with BCE, or Before the Common Era.
This is basically the secular version of dating years, BC, or Before Christ.
This appalled Schaffley, and he promptly learned that the student got this dating convention from Wikipedia.
Uh oh.
No good.
It's so funny that this one kid, by just including an E, basically sent this guy off the deep end.
Like, changed his life.
That's right.
Basically, this is what would consume Andrew Shafley's time from that year until today.
Amazing.
Shafley says that his suspicions of Wikipedia's bias were confirmed when his own edits to a Wikipedia entry on the controversy over teaching evolution in Kansas schools were repeatedly removed because they were obviously bullshit.
I can't change it myself and keep it that way, damn it!
Do they not know I have 50 annoyed kids in a room who hate me?
And so at age 46, Shaftley founded Conservapedia and used the same MediaWiki software that was used to build Wikipedia and a lot of other wikis.
And you know what?
There's really nothing wrong.
This is sort of like a, I think a legitimate use of like the wiki software is creating your own like, you know, personal volunteer database of whatever subject you think is interesting.
Yeah, like how to fuck every single Pokemon or, you know, which character is secretly gay?
I mean, yeah, I was I look this up all the time to see, like, you know, where's the best area to, you know, mine for Tanto berries and, you know, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
But he didn't really see it as, I don't know, as like as some sort of like this weird walled off thing.
He kind of viewed it as like, I don't know, a correction.
At first, Shafley urged his students to post these brief, sometimes one-sentence entries on ancient history.
He basically used his homeschool students as free labor in this Wikipedia project.
Amazing.
Fantastic.
But the topics soon multiplied, and there were many contributors from all over the country who were sick of Wikipedia's supposed slant on things.
The homepage for Conservapedia in those early days of 2006 explicitly laid out that the site was built by a sense of grievance.
Welcome to Conservapedia, your conservative encyclopedia.
An online encyclopedia you can trust.
Tired of the liberal bias every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears?
On Wikipedia, A.D.
is replaced by the anti-Christian C.E.
Christianity is not given any credit for the Renaissance, liberal editors block certain conservative edits, and a page describing Wikipedia bias was taken completely down.
Wikipedia has gone the way of CBS News.
It's long overdue to have competition, like Fox News.
Oh boy.
Here is a succinct and educational resource for you, your children, and your students.
Conservapedia does not clutter its pages with trivia, vulgarity, political correctness, or gossip as Wikipedia does.
If you are a teacher or parent, you will much prefer using Conservapedia rather than Wikipedia.
You will also prefer Conservapedia for yourself if you want information free from liberal or anti-Christian bias.
Yeah, we have removed all nude statues.
No one will be jacking off to this wiki.
Shaftley himself, he clarified that Conservatpedia had a particular point of view and he was unapologetic about it.
It's impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral.
I mean, let's Let's take a point of view, let's disclose that point of view to the reader.
Interesting.
Kind of true, though.
Like, he is correct about, you know, subjectivity of facts in certain cases.
You know, that is an interesting point.
Because, like, yeah, I mean, like, I know that Wikipedia, it strives for a neutral point of view.
It is more of a, you know, it's an aspiration than anything that perhaps can be achieved in reality.
But he has a, I guess, a different perspective.
It's like, oh, well, listen, if a truly neutral point of view is impossible, then let's just drop the pretense and
let's just lay our cards on the table.
Let's just admit where our biases are.
Based on how he sounds, I think his point of view is looking out the lid of a trash can on Sesame Street.
Many of the articles found the Conservapedia are and were completely uncontroversial.
For example, there's an entry on the tuba, and it's about 150 words, and describes a tuba as a brass wind instrument, the lowest in pitch of all commonly employed wind instruments.
And it goes on to say that it is played vertically, and it has three to five values.
For its source on this entry, Conservapedia cites the New American Desk Encyclopedia.
Now, It's much shorter and less informative than the tuba entry on Wikipedia, but it's factually correct and unbiased.
The tuba is an instrument that often plays when I fall downstairs.
But on, honestly, most other topics, Conservapedia's bias becomes evident.
Conservapedia seems to operate from this very simplistic view of the political spectrum that is and was popular with talk radio hosts.
So, when they say conservative, they really mean this particular brand of American evangelical Christian conservatism.
And anyone on the right who doesn't fit into that brand is a Rhino or Republican in name only.
And anyone on the left of that is referred to as liberal communist or Marxist interchangeably.
So Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Stalin himself, anarchists are basically all the same kind of thing.
That's right.
Not me.
This perspective is evident in multiple entries.
For example, Conservapedia defined environmentalists as people who profess concern about the environment and know that some want to impose legal limits on the use of toilet paper.
They're gonna take away our plies.
What kind of country do we live in if I can't wipe my ass liberally?
Yeah, they're basically trying to make you wipe your ass conservatively.
Yeah.
What's your problem?
There's an entry on the minimum wage, and a hike in the minimum wage was referred to as a controversial maneuver that increases the incentive for young people to drop out of school.
Wow.
Well, he wasn't lying about just basically being like, this is what I think.
Yeah.
There's maybe some bias involved.
But strangest of all, since its inception, Concertopedia has displayed a bias towards young Earth creationism.
Now, not merely skepticism towards biological evolution, not merely creationism generally, but rather a belief that sometime between six and ten thousand years ago, the universe and the earth were created in under a week.
And this is based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis.
Like I pointed out before, not only is this empirically wrong, it's also a minority viewpoint in global Christianity, even though many of the earliest Christian theologians believe that Genesis was more allegory than literal history.
It's just so weird because like 10,000 years ago, that was about a thousand years after the first stone religious temple was built in modern-day Turkey.
It was also about 500 years after humans first domesticated cattle, according to DNA analysis.
Like, 10,000 years ago, the first people to inhabit the American continent were around and hunting mastodon.
People were doing things all over the world 10,000 years ago.
But beyond that, we actually know that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, thanks to radiometric data.
This age was calculated with precision by a scientist named Claire Cameron Patterson for a 1956 paper called Age of Meteorites and the Earth.
So, to think that the world is 10,000 years old, when it's actually about 4.5 billion, is not a little bit wrong.
It's like thinking that the distance between Los Angeles and New York is about 26 feet.
Even if you don't know the exact distance between L.A.
and New York, you gotta know it's not 26 feet.
That's way off.
Yeah, it's at least 28.
I mean, it's gotta be, you know, a few miles.
Look, it's gotta be at least 100 miles.
Yeah.
Or 500 miles, like the song, you know, I would walk 500 miles.
He was singing about walking from L.A.
to New York.
Yeah, of course.
And what about the bottles of beer on the wall?
Like, is that also a measure of L.A.
to New York?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, probably about 10 bottles of beer.
After about 10, you might find yourself in LA or New York.
Yeah.
Now, this bias towards Young Earth creationism can be seen in all of Conservapedia's articles about geologic periods.
For example, the entry on the Jurassic period is just 144 words long, which is actually shorter than the entry on the Tuba.
And the Jurassic period entry ends like this.
Flood geologists reject the uniformitarian assumptions behind the dates derived by secular geologists, so they reject these dates.
Instead, they would consider most, if not all, Jurassic strata to be laid during Noah's Flood.
Many sediments containing dinosaur fossils are assigned to the Jurassic, which evolutionists believe to be the peak time of the dinosaurs.
So I think it's fair to say that, like, the main thing he's really innovating here is just removing stuff, right?
Like, just not letting the information get out, right?
It's just like, yeah, 144 words, that's a Jurassic period, done!
This gives me a great movie idea about Noah having to herd.
You know, pairs of dinosaurs onto the Ark, in addition to the other wild animals.
I think that would make for a really good one-location thriller.
You know, you're trapped on the Ark, there are raptors loose on the ship, and they're gobbling up your family.
I think this could be really good.
We could get Adam Driver to play Noah, and we could get Chris Pratt to play the raptors.
Ah, a good Christian, then.
One of the first television interviews with Andrew Shafley took place on the Canadian program The Hour.
In that report, Shafley made it clear that his version of Wikipedia would include more creationism and condemnation of homosexuality.
Wikipedia has become unsuitable because it's become very biased.
It's become very anti-American.
I know a lot of people like to talk about the evolution issue.
There are people who are obsessed with promoting evolution.
On Conservapedia, you're going to get the other side of that.
You're going to get evidence against evolution.
Same thing for homosexuality.
we bring in all the health harm that's caused by homosexuality, all the biblical quotes against
it, you get that on conservative media, you're not going to get that sort of fair treatment
on the Wikipedia entries. Oh man, I've never seen someone who deserves a wedgie so much.
What is that, like, Looney Tunes music in the background?
Dude, this literally looks like a Saturday Night skit where, like, this guy's about to, we're about to find out that he's got, you know, balls but no penis.
You are obsessed with that skit.
That is a very specific kind of imagery that I think would be funny for this gentleman.
Now, the thing about wikis is that anyone is able to edit the entries, even if they aren't sympathetic to Conservapedia's cause.
And so there were some people who attempted to change the Conservapedia entries so that their content was more in line with mainstream science, and that did not go over well.
For example, there was a man named Dr. Peter Lipson.
He was an internist in Southfield, Michigan, and he repeatedly tried to amend an article on breast cancer to tone down Conservapedia's claim that abortion raises a woman's risk.
The site's administrators, including Schaffley, questioned his credentials and shut off debate.
And so Lipson and some other disgruntled conservopedia editors, most notably Trent Toulouse, formed a new wiki called Rational Wiki.
And at first, Rational Wiki was mostly a forum to discuss ways of improving the scientific content of conservopedia, but that changed on May 16th and 17th of 2007.
On those days, every conservopedia editor who was identifiable as a contributor to Rational Wiki was permabanned.
Oh my god, if you're gonna participate in this competitor, you are banned forever and they have a name for this event
on rational Wiki is called the the night of the blunt knives. Oh my god.
The nerds are fighting in the digital fields They're fighting to this day. There are there I mean on
rational wiki. There are long articles about Conservapedia and like unlike on rational on conservapedia
There are these weird articles about like individual editors on rational wiki and how they like snack foods and
how they must not value Their health if they like snack foods and stuff
It's absolute insanity.
Just, yeah, right?
Bitter.
It's like an old school, long running flame war.
I love that.
I love making an entry on my conservative version of Wikipedia for Trent Toulouse and just saying, cunt!
Once in 2009, Phyllis Shafley, she hosts a radio program, and she featured as her guest none other than her son, Andrew Shafley.
And on that program, Andrew Shafley explained why it was important to quickly ban troublemakers, and even some teenage conservapedia editors had the power to ban other editors if they caused trouble.
We have about a dozen or so top-flight conservative administrators, and Dean is one of them.
What do you do, Andy, if somebody tries to post something that's really obnoxious?
We revert it almost immediately and if it's an example of someone who cannot be rehabilitated, who's just got a very bad attitude or vandalizing the site, we block them immediately.
And I must say that's a bit of mental exercise that That is an empowering feeling to escort people out and kick
them off the site.
Even for teenagers, it's a valuable experience for them to see that there are bad guys out
there and the teenagers have blocking powers and they can exclude people too.
And that's valuable for them to learn that there are deceitful people out there who need
to be blocked and excluded.
Wow.
Where did this guy get kicked out from?
That he had to describe it as like, "It feels good to grab them by the back of their wrists,
slap cuffs on them, and escort them out of the internet."
Well, I'll tell you where he was banned from.
Wikipedia!
And now that started a chain reaction where it's like, well, I'm a Wikipedia guy turned into a conservapedia guy turned into a rational wiki guy.
Oh my god.
And something that's very valuable for the teenagers is learning how to block and ban.
We want kids 13 to 17 to feel that power of the block and the ban.
Yeah, the ban hammer.
Andy, Andy, what do you do if somebody's got a potty mouth on the website?
Well, Mom, I kick them right out.
Yeah, I love it.
He's like, listen, we tried to teach them.
We tried to teach them that we were correct about the tuba, but they wouldn't listen.
They wouldn't listen and they kept coming back.
And so, yeah, I feel pretty good calling security on these motherfuckers.
I must say, Mom, it does feel really good to be the one doing the banning for once.
Now, Conservapedia was brought to the attention of the scientific community thanks to what is known as the Lenski Affair.
And the Lenski Affair concerns Andrew Shaftley's attempt to challenge the E. coli long-term evolution experiment.
And this is a famous ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski at the Michigan State University.
Now, this is, I think, really interesting.
So, the E. coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment, it addresses a major frustration in studying evolution, which is that it's impossible to go back in time, you know?
In order to research how the evolution of life happens, scientists have to look at the modern diversity of life, examine their phenotypes and genotypes, and make inferences about how life forms are related, you know?
Fossils, they can give us some clues about the kind of life that existed in distant past, but only some creatures leave behind hard materials that can be fossilized.
And even then, fossilization happens under the exact right conditions.
So only a fraction of percent of creatures are ever fossilized.
So the record is going to be incomplete, necessarily.
Yeah, I plan to just dissolve like a slug in salt water when I'm done here.
I don't want to leave any, there won't be, I don't want any trace.
They're gonna find, like, remnants of, like, uh, like, uh, home console, like, hardware just around me.
They'll be like, oh, this, this man, uh, this man had two Xboxes.
He must have been a king!
This is the only fossil of your father that we have, little Billy, and it is a half-crushed
joint bent out of shape because he fell asleep on it.
What if you could watch a population evolve over time and see how it changes and then
freeze some of that life as it is and then put that frozen population aside
that allow another strain of that organism to keep evolving?
And then if you wanted to go back in time, you know, essentially, you could see how life existed in the past.
You could go back to an earlier sample and unfreeze it.
So this is like the basic premise of Dr. Lenski's E. coli long-term evolution experiment.
They observe how a culture of bacteria evolves and then they freeze a sample at periodic points in its development.
Now, it started with 12 populations of the same ancestral strain of E. coli in 1988.
Now, the populations, they're stored in this warm liquid with a little salt and sugar, which allows the bacteria to reproduce and evolve.
Samples from each population are periodically stored at negative 80 degrees centigrade, where they are available for later study.
Now, importantly, The frozen cells are viable, such that changes in performance can be analyzed at later times.
So if a culture of bacteria evolves in a significant way, they can actually go back to the frozen sample and unfreeze it and see if it evolves again in the exact same way.
Oh wow, that's a really interesting way to actually study the evolution.
This is actually amazing.
Of course this pissed off that nerd.
I know.
It sucks that it made them mad, because it is really cool, because it allows scientists to examine questions that have eluded scientists for many, many years.
They can ask, is the process of adaptation by natural selection slow and gradual all the time, or are there periods of rapid change and stasis?
So this can examine the evolutionary concept of punctuated equilibrium, which was developed by Niles Eldridge and Stephen Gold.
Or does fitness eventually reach some kind of maximum level, or can organisms just keep improving forever, even in a constant environment?
Will separate populations achieve the same fitness peaks, or will some discover better solutions for their ecological niche than others?
If the populations reach the same level of fitness, does that imply the same underlying genetic changes?
No, it's really fascinating stuff.
And as expected in the experiment, you know, even after thousands of generations of mutations, the changes are usually pretty minor.
However, in 2008, researchers published an extraordinary discovery about the evolution of E. coli.
So the discovery is actually made in 2003.
So scientists know it is something that's very strange in one of the 12 flasks.
At first, the team suspected that some of the other species of bacteria had slipped into the flask and was breeding quickly.
But they found that the flask was packed with E. coli, descendants of the original ancestor that Lenski had used to start the entire experiment.
Somehow, the bacteria in this one flask had evolved a way to grow much, much faster than the other bacteria.
The scientists determined that the bacteria had made a very drastic switch.
What happens is that they weren't just feeding on the glucose, the sugar, anymore.
They're also feeding on another compound called citrate.
Now, citrate is an ingredient in the broth where the E. coli grows in this experiment.
Now, it's not supposed to be food.
Instead, it helps keep the minerals in the broth in the right balance for E. coli to grow.
This is very weird to them because E. coli typically can't feed on citrate in the presence of oxygen.
But then one of the E. coli guys was like, you boys thinking what I'm thinking?
I think I want to eat this.
I know we're not supposed to, but I want to eat this shoe.
Yeah, that's basically it.
So it was just a shocking discovery.
And what it basically meant is that the bacteria had evolved the ability to feed on something that isn't normally food.
And this wasn't just a case of natural selection enabling a species to do something better. The population has evolved the ability to do
something new and they have it frozen in labs so they can watch it happen over and over again if they are
so inclined. Very cool stuff.
Yeah, this is a lot like when humanity evolved to be able to digest
Uncrustables and Jacob's created.
Well, I would argue that I actually devolved that, you know, basically once the pandemic hit,
you know, I realized that instead of, you know, cooking and eating healthy meals,
that I could order McDonald's most nights out of the week.
And so, you know, my body sort of evolved to process that new, you know, that new compound that I wasn't supposed to be processing.
I do love the idea of like basically freezing something at like every step of its evolution and or freezing part of the population and then kind of being able to unfreeze it to like compare it and see, hey, actually maybe, you know, it'll not develop the ability to eat this this substance or or whatever.
I mean, I have an ape that I've frozen every year since 1983.
This gives me another great idea for a movie where, like, an evil corporation basically unfreezes, like, 20 people from, like, I don't know, 20 different eras, you know, a couple hundred years apart, and then makes them compete in some kind of, you know, like, Squid Game style, uh, you know, Battle Royale.
Okay, okay, so it's... The pitch would be, um, it's, it's Squid Game meets Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Dude, that's a great pitch.
That's a great pitch.
I'm leaving the podcast today.
I'm going to sell that right now.
All right, Travis, tell us more about E. coli.
So what happened was that in 2008, the publication New Scientist published an article describing the results of this experiment, and it was brought to the attention of Andrew Shafley.
Shaftley was, of course, not happy with the suggestion that evolution was observed experimentally in a lab, and so he sought to show why it must have been mistaken.
Shaftley contacted Lenski to request the raw data.
Lenski explained that the relevant data was in the paper, and Shaftley fundamentally misunderstood it.
Shaftley wrote again and requested the data, to which Lenski wrote this very long, scathing response, explaining why Shaftley's response was nonsense and not in good faith.
Now, I've edited an abridged version of the letter here, but this is something that was essentially legendary to the kinds of nerds who read science blogs in the aughts.
I offer this lengthy reply because I am an educator as well as a scientist.
This was just a large, yeah, huge epic oath.
Shaftley destroyed by Lenski.
I offer this lengthy reply because I am an educator as well as a scientist.
It is my sincere hope that some readers might learn something from this exchange, even if
you do not.
First, it seems that reading might not be your strongest suit given your initial letter,
which showed that you had not read our paper and given subsequent conversations with your
followers in which you wrote that you still had not bothered to read our paper.
You wrote, quote, I did skim Lenski's paper.
If you have not even read the original paper, First, how do you have any basis of understanding from which to question, much less criticize, the data that are presented therein?
Second, your capacity to misinterpret and or misrepresent facts is plain in the third request in your first letter where you said, quote, in addition, there is skepticism that three new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000.
The statement was followed by a link to a news article from New Scientist that briefly reported on our work.
I assumed you had simply misunderstood that article because there is not even a mention of proteins anywhere in the news article.
As I replied, quote, we make no such claim anywhere in our paper, nor do I think it is correct.
Proteins do not, quote, appear out of the blue in any case.
As further evidence of your inability to keep even a few simple facts straight, you later wrote the following, quote, It, my reply, did clarify that his claims are not as strong as some evolutionists have insisted.
But no competent biologist would, after reading our paper with any care, insist or even suggest that, quote, three new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000, or any similar nonsense.
It is only in your letter and in your acolyte's confused interpretation of our paper that I have ever seen such a claim.
Am I or the reporter for New Scientist somehow responsible for the confusion that reflects your own laziness and apparent inability to distinguish between a scientific paper, a news article, and a confused summary posted by an acolyte on your own website?
Third, It is apparent to me, and many others who have followed this exchange and your online discussions of how to proceed, that you are not acting in good faith in requests for data.
From the posted discussion on your website, it is obvious that you lack any expertise in the relevant fields.
Several of your acolytes have pointed this out to you, and that your motives are unclear or questionable at best.
But you and your cronies dismiss their concerns as rants, and even expelled some of them from posting on your website.
Several also pointed out that I had very quickly and straightforwardly responded that the methods and data supporting the evolution of the citrate utilization capacity are already provided in our paper.
As further evidence of the absence of good faith discussion about our research, in the discussion thread that began even before you sent your first email to me, I counted the words fraud or fraudulent being used more than 10 times, including one acolyte, Tony T. Tony Tiara!
It's gotta be him!
Oh my God.
Including one acolyte, Tony T, who says bluntly that I am, quote, clearly a fraudulent hack.
Well, well, well, if it isn't the young Earth creationist that told me I did a paint job.
Tony T.
In the discussion thread that also includes comments after my first reply, the number of times those same words are used has increased to 20, with the word HOAX also now entering the discussion.
A few posters wisely counseled against such slander, but that did not deter you.
I must say, it is surprising.
Surprising that someone with a law degree would make and allow on this website so many nasty comments that implicitly and even explicitly impugn my integrity and by extension that of my collaborators without any grounds whatsoever and reflecting only your dogmatic adherence to certain beliefs.
Finally, let me now turn to our data.
As I said before, The relevant methods and data about the evolution of the citrate-using bacteria are in our paper.
In three places in our paper, we did say, quote, data not shown, which is common in scientific papers owing to limitations in page length, especially for secondary or minor points.
None of the places where we made such references concern the existence of the citrate using bacteria.
They concern only certain secondary properties of those bacteria.
We will gladly post those additional data on my website.
It is my impression that you seem to think we We have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli.
If we had made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records.
If we did not, then, as some of your acolytes have suggested, you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess.
But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper.
Or perhaps because you aren't very bright.
You seem to not understand that we have the actual living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants.
Man, this is some TLDR.
Sorry, buddy.
Didn't read it.
Don't care.
Citrate-using nerd.
So the letter concluded with four postscripts.
Obviously, these are performative.
This is online.
P.S.
Fuck you.
P.S.
Fuck you and you.
Fuck you, Tony T. So the last of the postscripts said this.
I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on deceit.
that article begins as follows, "Deceit is the deliberate distortion or
denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another.
Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong. For example, the Old
Testament says, 'Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.'"
You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you
go around bearing false witness against others. Amazing.
All over bacteria.
All over literally cloudy liquid.
You know what?
I'll take this online feud any day.
The ones that we have now are so much stupider and not quite as funny.
Yeah, yeah.
They are incredibly a lot nastier.
Looking back on this, it is so Wait, that this was considered epic ownage.
Sir, I see that you have not read the data.
Let me direct you to where you can find it.
And this was considered just a scathing slapdown.
Nowadays, they like dox your address and then like harass you on your way to work and shit.
Right, right, right.
These were the good old days when you actually had to form an opinion and write out an argument as opposed to just sharing, you know, a gif or a meme, you know, in place of having to do any actual thinking or writing.
Yeah, now they would just post, like, Jim from The Office.
Yeah, exactly.
And it'd be like, oh, got you, dude.
Yeah, there'd be a bunch of, like, popcorn eating gifs.
Can you explain, Travis, why when I was visiting you over at your place, that every morning I could hear you read out this entire letter to yourself in the mirror?
You know, yeah, it's how I hype myself up.
Better than coffee, honestly.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
Travis's therapist told him, you know, to read something inspiring, you know, to himself every morning, and this is what he chose.
Now, Travis, you know you have hypertension.
You stay away from that Shaftley stuff.
So, to close out the decade, in 2009, Andrew Shaftley launched, through Conservapedia, the Conservative Bible Project.
This project aimed to translate the Bible from its original languages into English in order to remove perceived liberal bias in the current English translations.
Except, the problem is that the translators didn't really seem to be actually familiar with the languages that the Bible was written in.
So instead, it wound up being just kind of rewording the King James Bible.
That's awesome.
They're like, okay, well first off, rich people can get into heaven.
Forget the camel and the needle.
What else we got?
So this project is based on several principles, including a preference for conciseness over what they called liberal wordiness.
They also said that the translation must not be influenced by what they called unscientific views, such as those that deny the global flood in Genesis.
Yeah.
Christ will no longer be they-them.
Right, yeah.
They also wanted to avoid ambiguous, politically correct terms to enhance clarity, so they said.
And they also wanted to avoid emasculating the inherent masculinity of Christianity, according to them.
Oh yeah, that's big.
What?
What does that even mean?
That's awesome.
It's like, we want to make sure that Eve comes off looking like a bitch.
So, yeah, this project was baffling even to, like, conservative Christian scholars.
Claude Mariottini, who is a professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Seminary, said this of the project.
"If conservative Christians make an effort to rewrite the Bible in order to present a conservative translation as an
effort to eliminate liberal interpretation of biblical texts, then such a translation will violate every hermeneutical
principle used by Bible translators in their effort to give the reading public a translation that is faithful to the
original intent of the biblical writer.
A translation of the Bible must translate the biblical text in the language of the reader without infusing the
theological presuppositions of the translator.
If a conservative translation changes the meaning of the original text in order to support a theological viewpoint, even when the theological viewpoint reflects Christian orthodoxy, that translation ceases to be a faithful translation.
When you read passages of this translation of the Bible—translations used in not even a loose term, it's just totally detached from any meaning of translation—but when you read their new version, it's pretty clear that they translated it through the lens of conservative versus liberal culture wars.
Oh my God, today they would just be like, Jesus got cancelled and shit.
I can just, it's just so unbearable.
You fucking annoying bastards.
That is basically it.
So I'll give you a couple examples here.
So this is the King James version of Luke 11, 53 and 54.
And as he said these things unto them, The scribes and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently and to provoke him to speak of many things laying wait for him and seeking to catch something out of his mouth that they might accuse him.
Of course, yeah, classic thing.
The Pharisees tried to provoke Jesus, but he could not be provoked.
But the Conservative Bible, which was actually done by Andy himself, reads like this.
As Jesus told them off, the scribes and Pharisees furiously interrogated him about everything, plotting and seeking to quote him for a politically incorrect remark to use against him.
Oh my God.
And so the Pharisees sought to cancel Jesus, but lo, he was uncancellable.
I was joking, but I guess it's exactly what I thought.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's also, I want to show you, this is Luke 12, verse 43 and 44 of the King James Bible, and this is what it says.
"Blessed is that servant whom his Lord when he cometh shall find so doing.
Of a truth I say unto you that he will make him ruler over all that he hath."
Alright, and this is the conservative Bible version.
"Blessed is that manager whose employer finds working so diligently."
Truly, I tell you, he will promote that manager to run all of his affairs.
Okay, bleep.
Immediate bleep.
Your brains are bleep.
No?
Yes.
And lo, blessed is the employee who takes initiative and finds ways to save his employer money.
Incredible.
Ah, blessed he who agreeeth to worketh for smaller wageth.
I have one more example for you.
This is from the King James Bible.
1 Corinthians 1.17.
For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.
And then that turns into this.
In any case, Christ didn't send me to baptize.
He sent me to preach the gospel, but not with the kind of liberal claptrap that would make Christ's sacrifice ineffectual.
Dude, you're putting liberal claptrap in the Bible?
This is unreal.
Oh my God, how is this guy even taking himself seriously?
You call yourself a Bible reader and you're like turning it into like a workplace comedy?
Like, come on.
I mean, like I said, like this guy was like marinated since birth in like just liberal versus conservative culture wars.
I really think he views, this is his metaphysics.
This is his structure of reality.
And so he, that sounds absurd to us, but like he really, he reads the Bible and then he, because of his viewpoint, he changes, you know, terms to liberal claptrap.
That's amazing.
He did a gritty reboot of the Bible.
Wait, wait a sec.
So, I'm looking at these two passages, and there's no way you could even interpret the original passage to contain any kind of speaking out against, like, a different political viewpoint.
What he's essentially saying, if I might do a little bit of Bible study myself, is he's basically saying, like, I'm not here to baptize you, I'm here to, like, preach the gospel.
And the gospel itself, it's not the words, it's the fact that that Christ died on the cross that is effectual.
Like I'm not trying to force you, but I'm trying to show you how real this is so that
you'll want to baptize yourself, essentially.
There's no part of it, I think, that you could even as a stretch kind of insert the idea
of a liberal clap trap.
I mean, am I wrong?
If you were to view all lies and nonsense as liberal clap trap, like if you thought
they were synonymous, then this translation would make sense to you.
I see.
My interpretation is that words and sentences themselves are liberal.
Yeah.
You got the subject and the predicate, you know, dropping off fake ballots.
That's a grammar joke, everybody.
Alright, I'll be here all night.
I headshot you too.
Brain's all over my computer.
Now, Conservapedia has long been the subject of vandalism.
So, you know, vandalism on wikis is when individual pages are replaced with parodies or nonsense or insults by trolls.
And Conservapedia helpfully has a collection of this kind of vandalism called Essay Examples of Moronic Vandalism by the Tolerant, in sort of sarcastic quotes.
And which is really is kind of funny because it's like an entry of like all the times we were owned on Conservapedia and we got really mad about it.
For example, there was a user by the name Johnny Cochran who replaced the Wikipedia entry on Conservapedia with just this.
I believe he is quoting the iconic Snoop Dogg song in this post.
Yeah, if Snoop Dogg famously rapped... Yeah, if Snoop Dogg famously... Ring-a-ding-dong, ring-a-ding-dick-dick, rick-dick.
This is amazing that he kept this.
He's like, this is how dumb they are.
Exactly.
Yeah, they preserve this specifically to show, look at what they're doing to our conservopedia.
Here is a list of all of Drill's tweets.
There's also someone who went by the name Boogerman who added this to Conservapedia's entry on homosexuality.
Homosexuality is a sexual attraction between members of the same sex.
It is approved by the Bible as an egregiously cool act.
Also, Jesus himself enjoyed a good homosexual orgy now and then.
Of course, this can only be found in the Bible.
But cut!
You know, the proper Bible.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
Some of the trolling was a little more subtle.
For example, someone added this line to an entry on Dinosaurs, which references the 1956 film Godzilla.
A documentary exists starring the American actor Raymond Burr in which a dinosaur menaces mainland Japan, but the veracity of the film is disputed.
Nice.
So that's the broad history of Conservapedia.
So with all that in mind, I thought it would be fun to browse some of the articles that they offer today.
One of the ones that really caught my eye was a article entitled Mystery.
Why do non-conservatives exist?
And if there are any women currently listening, obviously you should turn this off because it's going to be hard for you to understand this level of factuality and masculinity.
This is what that entry says.
Conservative principles are based on reason.
So why do non-conservatives still exist?
Here are some reasons.
Did not hear about conservative principles until after they made up their mind, perhaps due to pervasive societal bias, refused to reconsider.
Genuinely lack a desire to find the truth and instead desire attention, praise by liberal teachers, getting along by going along, and not standing up to liberal bullies.
Refused to forgive themselves and let go of their past mistakes and image.
Believe myths created around government programs like the New Deal that liberal policies create jobs instead of destroying them and depriving people of liberty through government control.
Fucking hell, they went straight for the New Deal?
This guy's a fucking monster.
The next one is fooled by the demonizing of conservatives and mistakenly feel that conservative benefits are available only to those who are from an intact family or privileged background.
Oh my god, conservative benefits.
Jesus Christ.
Refuse to rise above their personal temptations, often self-destructive, and hate conservatives who criticize their self-indulgent behavior.
Feel that they deserve to make more money than they do, as in public school teachers, university professors, and scientists, and refuse to rise above self-interest.
Oh my god, public school teachers!
You fucking piece of shit!
The reason why you're not a conservative is that you think you deserve more money.
If there's, like, one job that, like, kind of has inherent value, it's a public school teacher, it's so difficult to do, and you put up with so much bullshit, and I'm sure there's plenty of bad ones, of course, but, like, man, I can't think of, like, a more virtuous job.
Fuck.
Harbor a grudge against a conservative, typically a parent but sometimes an ex-spouse, and refuse to forgive or rise above the animosity.
Oh, this is so fucking awesome.
My kids hate me and my ex-wife hates me too.
They can't rise above animosity to listen to me lecture them.
Like an anarchist, genuinely want to believe in and propagate destructive ideas.
Due to the tendency of non-conservatives to refuse to admit this even to themselves, this number could be much higher.
Wow.
are susceptible to marketing and suggestion to an over-large degree.
Humans think in opposites at the most primological level.
As such, liberalism is sometimes an act of rebellion among the weak-minded.
Interpret Acts 4.32 to 5.11 as an endorsement of Marxist ideology.
Oh my god.
I looked up these verses, and so apparently these verses of the Bible describe how the earliest Christians sold their
possessions and distributed the money from their sales to anyone who
had need.
Fuck, I was joking about the camel and the needle and it's exactly that!
What is wrong with the American mind?
This is such a specifically American Christian mind.
Fucking hell.
Yeah, like I said, it's a very weird, narrow, American, Christian, conservative worldview.
But you're worshipping a false totem here, money.
My friend, my friend, you should listen to Jesus.
There are lots of other weird entries.
There's one entry on the topic of emotional gambling.
I haven't heard of emotional gambling before, but this is what it is according to Conservapedia.
Emotional gambling is investing one's emotions in the uncertain outcome of an otherwise meaningless event, such as a sports contest.
It is similar to gambling except no money is at stake.
Emotional gambling, like other kinds of gambling behavior, is highly addictive and can threaten the addict's capacity for a normal, healthy life.
In that respect alone, it can be considered sinful.
Emotional gambling distracts people's time and energy away from productive activities, such as reading the Bible.
So he's saying that caring about sports is a form of emotional gambling.
Holy shit, that's awesome.
You sportsball people will better start reading the Bible!
My eleventh commandment is as follows.
While watching the big game, one must not feel any sort of excitement or emotion whether thy team winneth or loseth.
Do not change the amount of chicken wings that you are consuming according to your mirth for your team.
Do not call your friends and invite them over for a day of fun and excitement.
A small escape from the drudgery of your normal life.
You must experience this supposedly fun event as you would any other.
There was also an entry on classism, which I thought was very strange and woke for an article in the Conservapedia to be concerned about, you know, about discrimination against classes.
Okay, sight unseen, sight unseen.
This is going to be about how the rich are discriminated against.
Well, this is what the Conservapedia article on classism says.
Classism is the bias against, discrimination against, or dislike of an individual or group due to their social class.
As with other forms of discrimination, such as the various forms of racism, classism is pervasive in leftist and liberal thought.
Many supporters of populist political movements, such as Brexit and Donald Trump's MAGA campaign, have faced abuse Well, actually, this is correct.
I stand corrected.
I don't agree with a lot of this, but at least he's not bitching about the rich getting targeted.
I don't know.
I think that when you're defining classism and you're thinking the very first example is people who supported Brexit, I feel like there are perhaps more examples that are more pertinent that better illustrate what you're talking about.
Oh, you mean like busting a union or something?
Like Bustiga Union, yes.
Yeah.
They also have an entry, of course, on Joe Biden.
It is really good.
I enjoyed this.
So here are just the first couple paragraphs.
Joseph Robinette Joe Biden, Jr., a.k.a.
Pops the Big Guy and my chairman, Born November 20th, 1942, is the authoritarian kleptocrat and dictator of the United States.
The official position of the Biden regime, as articulated by its chief press spokesperson, is that political opposition is, quote, a threat to democracy.
A prominent Holocaust trivializer, Biden has compared migrants who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexican border to Jews who perished in the Shoah.
Okay, that is- Now we're doing some fuckin' ninja.
We're doing some gymnastics.
Hell yes.
Yeah, so that's good.
But there's also this section headlined "Dictatorial Career."
[laughter]
"Country.
United States.
Military Service.
4F.
Highest Rank Attained.
Junta Leader.
Political Beliefs.
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
Communism.
Xi Jinping Thought."
I mean, just, he thinks like him.
"Marxism.
Liberalism.
White Supremacy.
Cacistocracy.
Political Party.
Democratic Party.
Date of Dictatorship.
November 4, 2020."
Holy shit, man.
Imagine coming here for information.
This is fucking amazing.
Yeah, this is insane.
Just scrambling your brain.
Trying to wrap my head around Xi Jinping thought.
Yeah, I'm trying to wrap my head around white supremacy.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, I also like the date of dictatorship.
That's not even when he took office.
That was just when the election happened.
And it doesn't make sense.
You can't have a date of dictatorship.
It would have to be the date of the beginning of his dictatorship or something, but it's just poorly written, poorly thought out.
I think whoever wrote this is so fucking bad.
They're not even thinking about actually communicating accurate, clear information.
No, I think a lot of the, I think the most mad gets filtered to the top on this site.
Joseph Robinette Gay Ass Joe Biden Jr.
A.K.A.
Bitch.
*Laughter* They might as well have written that in.
It would be funnier.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was kind of curious to see how Conservapedia handles current events.
Now, quite recently, four leaders of the Proud Boys were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the events of January 6.
So I wanted to see what the entry on the Proud Boys looked like.
And here's what Conservapedia has to say about that particular domestic extremist movement.
The Proud Boys are a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, international, conservative, or paleoconservative fraternal organization.
Proud Boys describe themselves as Western chauvinists and espouse pro-Second Amendment, pro-free speech, anti-illegal immigration, anti-fascist, and anti-racist views.
Uh-huh.
Let me guess, the kind of fascists you're thinking about are the Stalin kind.
That's awesome.
Yeah, I thought that was a weird way to describe the Proud Boys as anti-fascist and anti-racist.
So the actual convictions of the four Proud Boys are described this way.
Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys delivered opening statements on January 12, 2023, in the seditious conspiracy show trial of former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four other members.
On May 4th, 2023, Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordin, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rail were falsely convicted of sedition and other alleged felonies.
Jurors did not reach a unanimous verdict on the sedition charge for Dominic Pizzola, but he was falsely convicted of other trumped-up charges.
I mean, like, trumped-up charges, that's not encyclopedic concept, you know?
No, this is more like Opinionpedia.
If you ever wanted just, like, yeah, an entire wiki based on, like, what your racist Fox News grandpa thinks.
Yeah, yeah.
This is a good stress test, yeah.
Yeah, you're like, uh-oh, dad shut down when I started to talk about this.
Better go to Conservopedia and see what he believes.
Yeah, this is actually, like, a guide on how to, like, become a son again to your father that you're estranged from.
Conservapedia doesn't just have a problem with mainstream biology and geology, it also has a problem with mainstream physics.
For some reason, it has this beef with relativity, as described by Albert Einstein.
So, Conservapedia has an entry on E equals MC squared, the equation that's supposed to describe the equivalence of mass and energy.
Uh, more like, uh, Jew equal MC bad!
So...
Here's how the equation is ascribed on the E equals MC squared conservopedia page.
Numerous attempts to derive E equals MC squared from first principles have failed.
Political pressure, however, has since made it impossible for anyone pursuing an academic career in science to even question the validity of this nonsensical equation.
Simply put, E equals MC squared is liberal claptrap.
Does Liberal Claptrap have an entry on the site?
He uses it quite often.
Let me check actually.
Oh yes, please look it up for me afterwards.
It just says, things I don't like.
Physicists have never been able to unify light with matter, despite more than a billion dollars worth of attempts, and it is likely impossible to ever do so.
Biblical scientific foreknowledge predicts that there is no unified theory of light and matter because they were created at different times, in different ways, as described in the book of Genesis.
Okay, so... So once again, do not be fooled by modern science coming in and discovering new things.
They got it right the first time in the book from a thousand years ago.
Numerous attempts to derive 1 plus 1 equal 2 have failed.
So I checked, and liberal claptrap is in fact an entry on Conservapedia.
It says that liberal claptrap is pretentious nonsense promoted by liberals.
It has the wordy characteristics of liberal style, typically with self-serving conclusions.
Liberal claptrap leaves the audience with nothing of substance, nothing that will help them personally overcome the inevitable problems of life, such as addiction.
Okay, what?
That is so specific.
Is there a link on there that says, like, you know, for articles about Claptrap from Borderlands, please click this link, or?
No, no.
Differentiating it?
I mean, he is definitely liberal Claptrap.
What a fucking annoying little twerp.
Now, interestingly, Consumerpedia has a friendlier relationship to the field of quantum mechanics.
Okay.
Oh, well.
Surprising, yeah.
This is because the authors believe that it could be tied to biblical creation, the resurrection of Jesus, and the parables of Jesus.
And this is what it says.
Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics describing fundamental uncertainty in subatomic behavior.
Observation converts infinite uncertainty about where a particle is into a definite position.
The logic of quantum mechanics predicts the possibility of the resurrection, akin to quantum tunneling.
Okay.
They rolled the rock off of the quantum tunnel, and yay!
Did Jesus rise?
The order created by God is on a foundation of uncertainty.
The book of Genesis explains that the world was an abyss of chaos at the moment of creation.
Quantum mechanics is predicted by biblical scientific foreknowledge.
The parable of the sower, Matthew 13, 1-9, also embodies the uncertainty of quantum mechanics.
That's awesome.
Wow, this is great.
This gives me my third idea for a movie today, which is this idea that Christ, you know, it's not that he's like coming back from the dead, it's that we are waiting for him to sort of like, you know, kind of like blip into this timeline, kind of like sliders.
You know, and so the idea that that's the thing, like, you know, Jesus could be blipping through, like, a bunch of different timelines, kind of going down the line and saving everybody, and we're just kind of waiting for him to blip into ours.
Yeah.
I think that makes sense to me.
There are a hundred different Jesuses, you know, through a hundred different timelines, an infinite amount of Jesuses in an infinite amount of timelines, and the rapture in this reality will only take place once he dies on the cross in a neighboring sort of dimension and then uses quantum immortality to sort of pick up in this reality.
Can't wait to watch Christ into the multiverse.
Yes, that's how I would pitch this.
We don't need Christians to have an MCU, I don't think.
There are some entries on social concepts.
For example, here is the Conservativepedia entry on the concept of best friends forever.
The intent of Best Friends Forever as a concept is the solidification of a partnership between two people who mutually identify the other as the person who will be their most valued friend throughout the rest of their life.
In principle, the concept seems sound and affirming, but in practice, it has never worked.
What?
As the Best Friends Forever commitment tends to be entered into prematurely by grade school students, typically females.
Oh my God, he is debunking Best Friends Forever.
He's debunking BFF.
Yeah, he's going after your top fives, you know?
Oh my God.
This is sacrilegious.
Oh my God, he's just going after stuff that's in the margins of like their notebooks.
These little hearts that they keep putting above the eye.
He's like, when I was a grade school girl, I did enter into a contract with somebody who I believed to be my friend for life.
But then, they turned around and started dating Suzy Dirkens behind my back.
On the surface, the S that appears to be the Superman S that people are building out of straight lines does seem like a cool thing.
But beneath the surface, this S has done a lot of damage to the Bible.
There's also an entry on overrated sports stars.
Oh my God.
Let me guess.
Let me guess.
He doesn't like Colin Kaepernick.
No, no.
Yes.
Yeah.
This whole thing is a wiki grudge.
It's literally, you can look up grudges.
Yeah, there's some obvious ones, like Kaepernick.
There are some less obvious ones, too.
It's so bizarre, but it's just sort of like over-boiling with resentment that certain athletes get a lot of positive press coverage.
Oh my god.
This is how it starts.
The lamestream media like to promote athletes based not on skill but for liberal reasons.
Here are the most overrated sports stars.
None are among the greatest conservative sports stars.
Three on this list, Lance Armstrong, Tom Brady, and Tiger Woods, have been punished for cheating.
LeBron James and Tom Brady have declined to shake hands after losing in playoffs.
So here are a couple of the stranger entries from that list of 25 athletes and number one is Andre Agassi.
He writes, his rival Pete Sampras was far better, but Sampras is conservative.
Agassi is a big donor to Democrat politicians.
That's it.
That's it.
That's why they're overrated.
Wow.
Incredible.
That's so true.
He retired early to the American MLS League and then became a benchwarmer in the French League.
His own British 2012 Summer Olympics team did not even want him.
His real skill seems to be in catering to the liberal media.
That's so true.
I mean, one should not marry a girl who is too spicy.
Number three LeBron James.
Overpromoted by the media to an absurd extent.
LeBron James is arguably the current best NBA player, but overrated compared to outspoken Christian star Steph Curry and another Christian star Kevin Durant.
LeBron has sometimes even underachieved in key playoff games.
He helped Miami win two titles and helped Cleveland win a come-from-behind title in 2016, but again, received absurd overhype, such as the media claiming he is, quote, superhuman.
I mean, you can sort of hear there's some sort of, like, you know, some conservative sports fan who watches SportsCenter and just gets angry at the praise of athletes that aren't conservative enough for him.
Faces that show up on my television I hate.
And what is he talking about?
Like, you hear tons about Kevin Durant and Steph Curry.
Yeah.
Shut the fuck up.
He's just making shit up at this point.
Yeah.
Ben Roethlisberger.
He only won the Super Bowl twice, which isn't that many times, considering the team he's on has won six Super Bowl rings.
Despite this, there's more hype about him than there really needs to be.
Okay, wow.
Two Super Bowl wins?
That don't impress me much.
He can't stop listing their Ws and the reasons he hates them.
Yeah, he does.
Yeah, LeBron James with a come-from-behind win, I guess.
Yeah.
This one I have to agree with, because I do not like Cristiano Ronaldo, the soccer player.
His spectacular talents have been ruined by his self-obsession, vanity, and cravings of celebrity.
He is now officially sad, despite being one of the luckiest men alive.
His Portugal team was eliminated by Uruguay from the World Cup 2018, and Ronaldo's behavior towards officials was so disgraceful that it marred the tournament, as captured by photos.
No, man.
It didn't.
Uruguay played really fucking well.
They had good players.
And, yeah, I don't like Cristiano Ronaldo, but what are you fucking on about?
I don't know.
This is just the weirdest shit.
There's, like, at some point in the last, you know, 17 years or so, Conservapedia dropped all pretense of, like, well, we're just offering, like, a neutral or, I guess, something from a particular perspective.
This is obviously just pure opinion and just anger that some people are getting good press coverage.
Yeah, this could have been a W for him if he just posted, you know, your general sort of Wikipedia article and then added a couple conservative, you know, linked to a couple conservative opinion pieces and been like, oh, a conservative person said this about this, or they said this about this.
It would have at least been, you know, this you just look at and you're like, okay, this is like wiki grievance, like there's no... Yeah, this entire website is a sentient fedora.
Conservapedia also has an entry for Chivalry.
I thought this was really strange because the opening paragraphs include two separate mentions of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.
Oh my god, it is really just things I see on television.
Like, incredible.
Just brainless.
The word chivalry comes from the French word for knight.
The popular game of chess is based on chivalry, and a prominent historical example of chivalry was the self-sacrifice during the sinking of the Titanic.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Yes, he's talking about the film!
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
He thinks it's real!
Hold on, let me just let this sink in.
He is using a historical example of Leonardo DiCaprio's fictitious character sacrificing himself at the end of the movie?
This is fucking amazing.
He doesn't even say that it's the movie.
Is the Titanic sacrificing itself?
I don't think it wanted to hit that iceberg.
Is he aware that the Titanic didn't actually sink in the movie?
Like, that it was just a set?
I think they're trying to say, like, the principle of, like, women and children first during the actual sinking of the actual Titanic is an example of chivalry.
Okay, okay.
Fair.
Okay.
Well, he should have mentioned that because it sounds like he thinks that the movie is real.
Yeah.
What's really confusing to me is that when we talk about like, you know, historical chivalry, I was like, oh, yes, the medieval system, right?
You're talking about where the concept actually originated?
No, I'm thinking about early 20th century, the Titanic.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, I think we know what he's actually thinking of.
He's thinking of Leo slowly floating beneath the water as Rose, that freaking shrew, In 2022, an example of chivalry was Will Smith face-slapping Chris Rock on stage at the Academy Awards for Rock's unfunny joke about Smith's wife.
Oh my god, it's like face slapping, okay?
He did not slap his butt and go, "Hey, good on ya."
Leftists hate chivalry.
Perhaps because it is intrinsically heterosexual.
By undermining chivalry, leftists erode the cultural support of heterosexuality.
Liberals hypocritically banned Will Smith for 10 years for his act of chivalry at the Oscars in 2022, even though movies depend on similar displays of chivalry in order to attract viewers.
Okay, let's be clear.
Knights are the gayest I just hope Will Smith, like, doesn't see this stuff and go, oh, awesome, I have, like, a whole new audience that's, like, totally down for me, like, I'm gonna cater to them.
What the actual fuck are we reading or covering?
This is demented.
I just hope Will Smith doesn't see this stuff and go, "Oh, awesome!
I have a whole new audience that's totally down for me!
I'm gonna cater to them!"
I wish Will Smith would slap Travis for making this episode.
Conservapedia also includes an entry on famed film critic Roger Ebert.
It was really strange because it's very short and only mentions two films that Ebert ever talked about.
Passion of the Christ and the pro-intelligent design creationism film Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed.
Wow.
And here's basically the meat of that entry.
Although Ebert wrote that it was the most violent film he had ever seen, he gave Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, 2004, 4 out of 4 stars.
Showing true liberal duplicity, Ebert- Oh my god, dude.
Oh my god.
Showing true liberal duplicity, Ebert refused to review the film Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed, because of its expose of the atheist agenda in science and education.
But even though he refused to review the film, he nonetheless posted a several-page rant about the film on his blog, where he criticizes minor points involved in the production of the film, and then uses that to make it seem that he has also rebutted the main points of Ben Stein's argument.
Conservatives and creationists were outraged that such a trusted movie critic would use his column as a pulpit to proclaim his own personal politics.
But dude, you've named your — if you think it's annoying that liberals talk about their politics, you named your Wikipedia conservopedia.
Like, you couldn't be a more annoying political guy, like, that is constantly harping about his beliefs.
Well, I did not know that it was — that this was THE Ben Stein that he was talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
For some bizarre reason, yeah, Ben Stein hosted the biggest intelligent design documentary Yeah, Ben Stein was recently torn apart by unfrozen chimps in an experiment at Michigan State.
So, I got one last entry for you.
So, Conservapedia includes an entry on the video game industry.
Ah, yes.
Ah, excellent.
Jake is happy.
Which you can imagine it's not approving of.
So here's what Conservapedia has to say about the video game industry.
Unfortunately, the video game industry has a long history of unintentionally, or in some cases deliberately, spreading liberal values and ideals at odds with traditional conservative values.
Examples, excessive profanity, many times to the point of being added for shock value.
Meticulous designs of blood and gore, virtually every game rated for 17 plus players.
Allowing players to be terrorists and perform terrorism.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Counter-Strike series.
I would agree, but not for the reasons that he's saying.
Yeah.
Allowing players to have fornication with prostitutes.
All Grand Theft Auto video games.
WRONG!
It should be noted this is optional, as no GTA game has ever forced the player to fornicate with a prostitute as an unavoidable storyline event, but it does provide the player with some other gameplay bonus with no in-game downside, like a sexually transmitted disease, inadvertently encouraging the idea of unprotected sexual relations outside of marriage.
Dude, this is so cool.
This guy's worried that people are nutting in a video game.
He is so angry that people are nutting in real life already, but the idea that they have like this virtual nut that they're also getting.
Oh, I'm so furious.
They're nutting in the video game without getting herpes.
This is unacceptable.
This is so fucked.
Do you know how much cum has been wasted in GTA?
When I could fill my mouth to the brim with it.
Welcoming to more violence, such as providing bonus points for extra murders.
Almost every single game that provides bonus points or some other gameplay advantage for upping the player's kill count.
Uh, Splatoon.
These kids don't want to clean up their room.
They're painting it.
This is fucked.
Over-reliance on violence, then story.
Gears of War.
Mario.
Italians are basically blacks.
Overtones of Hollywood values.
Grand Theft Auto.
The Ballad of Gay Tony.
He really knows his Grand Theft Auto, which makes me think he kind of likes the game.
He definitely nutted in the game and then felt bad.
Yeah, that digital post-nut clarity.
I know, yeah, you really enjoy your drive with the radio blaring.
Allowing players to gamble in Las Vegas-themed casinos and borrow money from mafia bosses.
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, after completing a flight school.
Jesus, they really investigated this, huh?
Yeah, they really, yeah.
Here we go again.
In which I have all achievements.
The last one is Encourages Radical Terrorism, Red Faction, Guerrilla.
Great game.
Oh, man.
You can play as the Soviets in Red Alert.
I think that he just doesn't like that it has the word, like, red in the title.
Yeah.
Well, a guerrilla, yeah, it's like communist guerrillas.
But also, yeah, you're basically uprising against a tyrannical corporation on Mars.
And so this probably has Marxist undertones he doesn't appreciate.
That game had really cool, like, destructible environments, though.
I was one of the first ones that had, like, fully destructible environments that I can remember playing.
I love, like, imagining that there is an evil corporation on Mars and being like, actually, I think they're the good guys in the imaginary world.
Oh, incredible brain.
So that's Conservopedia, and it is still very much active today.
Actually, I checked the changes log on Conservopedia, and Andrew Schlafly is recorded as making updates and edits as recently as earlier today.
So he is still at it.
Well, I guess we can take this moment to say, how's it going, buddy?
How was the episode?
Did you enjoy it, Andrew?
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Real blast from the past, and I guess it's not quite as famous as it used to be.
Because Andrew Shaftley was so prescient, the world has kind of moved past him.
Well, there's a lot of new things to be angry about and have an opinion on, so he's, you know, he's gonna have entries, you know, for, you know...
The unforeseeable future.
He's out there somewhere squinting angrily.
Yeah, he's out there studying real hard the lesbian kiss in Horizon Forbidden West.
He's playing it over and over again and, you know, just really getting his pants in a bunch.
I have one final question for you, Travis.
What does Conservapedia say about QAnon?
Now that is a very interesting question, because it is not pro-QAnon.
It's actually, Conservapedia, it really is more of a classic kind of conservative conspiracist, and so here's what it says.
It says that QAnon, a.k.a.
Q, is a CIA psyop which masqueraded as an anonymous military intelligence person or group within President Trump's inner circle of advisors.
The highest U.S.
intelligence clearance rank is Q. This, of course, is not true.
This is just the Department of Energy rank, but whatever.
So it goes on to say, the purpose of QAnon is to neutralize opposition similar to Operation Trust, which was a Bolshevik counterintelligence operation run from 1921 to 1926.
Man.
This is awesome, it was written by Flynn, it's the Communist CIA.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like, the CIA has been the literal top force in the world against communism.
That is their whole fucking thing, is hunting communism to the point where they'll allow or enable genocides.
What the fuck are you talking about?! !
So it seems as though there was like some dispute.
So it's interesting.
So there's also a section in the QAnon entry in Conservapedia that says, Allegations of a Conspiracy Theory.
And it says, Q was considered a conspiracy theory by some because if Q was not thwarted, thousands of deep state political leaders would be indicted and jailed.
Time Magazine, not the even-handed publication it was many years ago, on June 28th, 2018, listed Q amongst the 25 most influential people on the internet.
That is true.
It was listed that.
So the occasional Q post is authored by Q+.
Obviously an alternate in the intelligence circle, maybe Trump himself.
So it sounds like a pro-QAnon person got to this page and sort of like entered some pro-Q propaganda.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's actually a good representation that there's like a bit of a kind of internal contradictions and disputes.
Yeah.
Among like red-pilled conservatives about QAnon.
Yeah.
I mean, again, like Michael Flynn, who we've always considered, you know, incredibly kind of positive about the QAnon movement and encouraging and going on like Q shows and stuff like that.
You know, he's also said this about the CIA.
And it's so it is like a kind of it's a type of being red-pilled now is like being this kind of like anti-QAnon or QAnon skeptic.
So it's interesting.
So if you go to the talk page on the Conservapedia entry on QAnon, someone who goes by the name jpat asks, credible or no?
Incredible is spelled with a Q. And they say, I don't follow QAnon stuff, but I am affiliated with enough people that do.
I see the content often, and much of that has come to pass that didn't pan out.
So is Q credible?
I find it fascinating how Democrats know all about Q, maybe more than right-wing folk.
She was demonized and has terroristic tendencies, according to leading Democrats.
I see much of it that is patriotic.
Much talk invoking God.
Democrats should ignore and dismiss, like they do Rush Limbaugh, fans as a fringe group.
They are not.
It is a serious threat.
Or it is made into a serious threat for their political ends.
It could be undercover intelligence agencies, counter-cyber warfare.
Regardless, it is here to stay.
Big tech bans it all day long.
It just reappears, the same people, under a new account.
Okay, cool.
Well, Conservapedia, congratulations.
What a good website.
I'm glad it's out there.
I'm gonna go and make an entry on Travis View.
Perfect.
Yeah, actually, that's not a bad idea.
Maybe we can have competing entries about him.
I mean, after this, Andrew is definitely going to make an entry about us, so I look forward to it.
Yeah.
Alright, fair enough.
We deserve it.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Liberal Claptrap Podcast, QAnon Anonymous.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and sub for five bucks a month.
You'll get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and the ongoing miniseries like Trickle Down and Man Clan.
If you're already a subscriber, thanks so much.
It helps us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Go check it out.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
The conservatives are going to redo the Bible.
Not all conservatives, but there's a group, and it's on Conservipedia, the clown-ass website we've quoted in the past.
They've put together a project where they're going to weed out all the liberal passages in the Bible.
First of all, good luck to you.
It's going to take you decades.
If you read the Bible, you have to get all the things about helping the poor, helping the needy, helping the sick, etc., etc.
You've got to almost obliterate the New Testament.
I don't know if anything's going to be left.
They want to redefine some words, like word.
Okay, I don't know why they want to do that.
Like Miracle, I don't know how they're going to redefine Miracle, but here's my favorite one.
They want to redefine the word peace.
Probably so that it means war.
And they say the whole point of this is to take away the framework, and I'm quoting here, of liberal bias in the Bible.
Come on, man!
You know how Stephen Colbert said, reality has a well-known liberal bias?
