He has a new book coming out, The War on Science. It does not look promising. Here’s a list of the contributors:
Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson
I don’t know all of those names, but the ones I do are just the worst. Krauss dredged the slime from the bottom of the grievance-obsessed academic shithole. I’m not going to read this trash, so I’ll let Genetically Modified Skeptic discuss what is in it.
It’s a collection of essays by people who are triggered by DEI. Screw that.
Janice Fiamengo! *Obi-wan voice* Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time…a long time. She’s long been one of the Not Like the Other Girls™ men’s rights activists.
The rest are a mix of the usual culture-war suspects and people I’ve never heard of. But something about the name “Christian Ott” sounded familiar…ah! His claim to fame is being the first faculty member suspended for gender-based harassment at Caltech, in 2015. (The unpleasant details.)
I suspect looking further into the list of authors will turn up similar gems.
With these authors, the title of the book is surprisingly appropriate.
how oddly appropriate to my post today.
I recognize about half those names.
They are slime from the bottom of the swamp.
The worst of the worst.
FFS, they’ve got that fake quack, Jordan Peterson in there.
They’ve got Niall Ferguson in there.
A generic far right extremist who never saw a conspiracy theory he didn’t immediately believe.
He is always wrong about everything but his notable delusions are cheering on the Iraq war long after it became apparent that it was a huge mistake.
He is also an Islamophobic hater, who was rattling on about how the Muslims are coming and going to overrun Europe and the USA any day now.
Still waiting for that one and it never is going to happen.
Jordan Peterson is definitely a real quack.
Amy Wax is on there.
She is a right wing extremist and an out and loud white racist.
At various times, she has attacked Asians, Indians, non-Westerners whoever they are, and of course Blacks.
Then she got upset when her employer, U. of Pennsylvania sidelined her.
Is it ironic that this is coming out just as the Trump administration is in the midst of an actual war on science, much of it in the name of the anti-DEI crusade promoted by these folks?
What timing. How are the scientists on that list not dying of embarrassment?
Krauss has no credibility as a science communicator. On Joe Rogan’s show, he completely fucked up his explanation of gauge symmetry. That, and other clues, have lead me to think he’s just another self-promoting douchebag.
I see Sabine Hossenfelder’s face among the pantheon of fallen gods. But, her name is not included in the list. I’ve watched a few of her YT videos. She’s a bit of a trip. A sensationalist desperately mugging for views with clickbait titles. She grabs popular science headlines and goes on some strange riffs. By the time she’s done, you realize you haven’t learned a damn thing.
John Watts @10:
Sadly, yes. She used to be a go-to explainer. The corruption of clicks…
I wonder if Jerry Coyne flirts again with the lab leak origin story as he’s several times done on his blog (in 2025).
And Boghossian could again hype up the Haitians eating the cats nonsense as he’s done at least twice on his Youtube channel.
Does Pinker march out his minimizing of the “bloody shirt” of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment again without even mentioning our STD experiments in Guatemala as he avoided in Enlightenment Now?
Three prominent jackasses right there telling us about science.
@10
Seems like she contributed a BS review quote
@12– Pinker didn’t just make excuses for the Tuskegee Experiment, he misrepresented the history to make it appear less obscene.
read some of yer examples, wotta nasty collection of creeps. might as well have gotten his old acquaintance ghislaine maxwell to write the foreword from her cell.
@ ^ Bébé Mélange : Slightly surprised Trump hasn’t pardoned her yet.
FWIW There could well be a quite a few good books written on the Trump regimes War on Science and
conservativeregressive polititicans attacking science generally. This book is obvs NOT gunna be one of them.@1 I assume this is the same Christian Ott: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azeenghorayshi/christian-ott-fired-turku-harassment
I stopped paying attention to that manchild after the sexual harassment business. I wish I could return the books I bought for credit.
Funny coincidence. Just earlier this week someone was arguing on Bluesky how many things Pinker fucked up wrt to creating an intellectual pseudorationale for some of the fash, antiscience, anti-trans and anti-women stuff happening in the US right now, and I replied by posting a pic of Krauss and Pinker with Jeffrey Epstein. People tend to forget this.
Let me guess: They’re concerned about how people don’t accept their wisdom on the subjects of dark matter and the use of CRISPR-CAS to develop new strains of agricultural products.
…
Or maybe it’s about their views on gender and race. It’s so difficult to tell. Could really go either way.
What timing. How are the scientists on that list not dying of embarrassment?
I get a feeling the authors of this magaturkey of a book were expecting a Democratic win last year; which would have enabled them to keep up the decades-old pretense that there’s a “liberal establishment” enforcing “liberal orthodoxy” and silencing good sensible conservatives who have been Just Asking Questions. And since radical right-wingers would have been defeated in that case, they could have focused attention on an ascendant “radical left” instead; and their case would have looked at least a tiny bit more plausible than it looks in this reality.