Behold, the magnificent swoop of my slippery slope!

Various conservatives are celebrating the publication of a new issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, or Peter Singer’s slush pile of pseudoscientific justifications for bigotry. The ideas aren’t so much controversial as they are bad. For instance, here’s one charming example from 2024, Intelligence and Immigration, by Christopher Heath Wellman. You could tell from the title alone that this was a trash fire of burning bigotry, but here, taste the abstract.

The relative intelligence of prospective migrants likely does little to move the needle on the central issue in the ethics of immigration, namely, whether states are morally entitled to forcibly exclude outsiders. Even so, I argue that varying levels of intelligence may be relevant to a number of theoretically interesting and practically pressing issues. In particular, such variations may in some cases (1) affect the number of refugees a country is obligated to accept, (2) be relevant to the advisability of encouraging refugees to resettle rather than attempting to help them where they are, and (3) have implications for relational egalitarians who are especially concerned with inequalities among fellow citizens.

The body text is even worse; it’s a meandering opinion piece with no evidence presented, and I was shocked that it didn’t even bother to cite Rushton, the source of all of its biases. I mention this to prepare you — there is little quality control in this “journal” which is prepared to publish the most egregious nonsense. If you desperately want an article defending blackface, they’ve got it. To be fair, they sometimes also publish criticisms of the garbage they put on their pages. For instance, there is an article titled Deflating Byrne’s “Are Women Adult Human Females?” that logically skewers the whole definitional approach to excluding trans women from the category of “woman”.

But what caught my eye in this journal was an article titled On the Intellectual Freedom and Responsibility of Scientists in the Time of “Consequences Culture” by Lee Jussim and others, including Luana Maroja and Jerry Coyne…names of reactionary culture warriors I’ve seen many times before, usually in the context of yelling about racism and misogyny, which they practice ably. I read it, and dismissed it out of hand, because it’s nothing but a slippery slope argument, which most of us know is a fallacy.

It practically telegraphs its intent in the abstract.

The 20th century witnessed unimaginable atrocities perpetrated in the name of ideologies that stifled dissent in favour of political narratives, with numerous examples of resulting long-term societal harm.

It’s not a good sign when it warns of past unimaginable atrocities as its premise. Don’t worry: it will fail to deliver any examples of similar atrocities in the contemporary world. In fact, it’s going to ignore actual atrocities to instead whine about small slights to scientists, blaming it all on those parts of contemporary society that are under genuine assault from the establishment.

Despite clear historical precedents, calls to deal with dissent through censorship have risen dramatically. Most alarmingly, politically motivated censorship has risen in the academic community, where pluralism is most needed to seek truth and generate knowledge. Recent calls for censorship have come under the name of “consequences culture”, a culture structured around the inclusion of those sharing a particular narrative while imposing adverse consequences on those who dissent. Here, we place “consequences culture” in the historical context of totalitarian societies, focusing on the fate suffered by academics in those societies. We support our arguments with extensive references, many of which are not widely known in the West. We invite the broader scientific community to consider yet again what are timeless subjects: the importance of freely exchanging views and ideas; the freedom to do so without fear of intimidation; the folly of undermining such exchanges with distortions; and the peril of attempting to eliminate exchanges by purging published documents from the official record. We conclude with suggestions on where to go from here.

I don’t know, I was looking forward with a little glee to the descriptions of the adverse consequences imposed on the kinds of assholes who compare their plight to the Holocaust, but it fails to deliver. The inciting incident for all this anxiety was one specific paper.

In 2020, Tomáš Hudlický submitted an essay to Angewandte Chemie (Hudlický, 2020) reviewing the evolution of organic synthesis since Seebach’s prior reflection on the field three decades before (Seebach, 1990). The essay, which included a discussion on the organic synthesis community, was peer-reviewed, accepted by the journal, and a pre-publication version was uploaded to the journal server. Among several topics Hudlický addressed, he argued that in some cases, institutional policies mandating “equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates” (Hudlický, 2020). Then, in an unprecedented action, the published article vanished from the journal’s server, with the DOI returning a 404 error (Howes, 2020). The withdrawal notice would appear some days later declaring that “the opinions expressed in this essay do not reflect our values of fairness, trustworthiness and social awareness” (Withdrawal, 2020).1 Unofficial copies can be found online, and further information can be found in Howes (2020) and Sydnes (2021).

Wait…the problem is the removal of a paper on organic synthesis, which wandered into a discourse on why maybe we’ve got too many chemists in certain subgroups who are less meritorious? Yes, remove such papers; they shouldn’t have passed peer and editorial review. I think even the authors of this terrible article that it would be misleading to lard a technical paper in chemistry with advocacy for social engineering, except that they’ll only do it when they agree with the social engineering part. A scientific review should be to the point, and not scurry off into topics on which the author is not at all qualified.

Jussim’s paper dwells on this incident with several paragraphs of breast-beating, and references to the KGB, ostracizing Sakharov, Lysenkoism, and the authoritarian territory of collective denunciations. I kept waiting for the grisly adverse consequences to Hudlický that they promised me, but they didn’t describe any. He had a paper removed from a journal. That was it. He wasn’t banished to a concentration camp in the Everglades, his family wasn’t bombed, he wasn’t even tortured. He wrote a flawed paper, the editors removed it, done.

Surely, they must have many more examples of tormented scientists to discuss. They do, sorta.

Hudlický’s is not the only case of “consequences culture”. This phenomenon is becoming pervasive in modern Western societies. Numerous academics across various fields in the USA (Abbot, 2021; Hooven, 2023; Lyons, 2022), Canada (CBC News, 2022; Howard-Hassmann, 2022), Germany (Sibarium, 2022), the UK (Adams, 2021; Gibbons, 2021), and New Zealand (Clements et al., 2021; Coyne, 2021a; Leahy, 2021) have been subjected to mistreatment after running afoul of activism of one kind or another. Between 2014 and 2023, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), logged more than 1,700 attempts to deplatform or discipline faculty for speech that should have been protected by academic freedom (FIRE, n.d.-a, n.d.-b), with incidents occurring at an increasing rate (Flaherty, 2021). Several other online databases have also been compiled (Acevedo, 2023; Cancel Culture Database, 2025). Looking into these cases, one finds that in many instances, the views expressed were neither extreme (Danagoulian, 2021; Howard-Hassmann, 2022), nor factually incorrect. In fact, some simply challenged questionable science or policy, or defended science from an assault by pseudoscience (Coyne, 2021a). For example, a medical student was expelled and forced to “seek psychological services” for challenging the validity of microaggressions (Cantu & Jussim, 2021; Hudson, 2021). Indeed, the problem is not limited to academia: those same regressive authoritarian tendencies are evident in other strata of Western society (Applebaum, 2021; Tabarovsky, 2020), as are attempts to deny their existence or minimise their dangers (Young, 2021).

Interesting that they cite FIRE, a far-right, Islamophobic organization that explicitly claims that far-right, Islamophobic professors must be defended, but doesn’t mention TPUSA, which maintains a Professor Watchlist and calls for the firing of liberal professors. Most of the sources mentioned are about aggrieved conservative professors claiming that they were denounced for declaiming their bigoted views, but there’s a notable lack of examples of mistreatment. The one specific example given is a medical student being advised to seek psychological services, which is not the public whipping and flaying I was hoping for. Darn.

They then declare that science hasn’t been as repressive as those liberals claim, so we get a bizarre section that they purport shows the dishonesty of the people who disagree with them.

Just as Herbert et al. selectively dismiss some lived experiences, they overlook historical facts that complicate their narrative. They claim, for instance, that the “gentlemen of the Royal Society” of London 150 years ago “could not imagine that Asians, African-Americans, Jews, Arabs, women, or LGBTQIA+ individuals would find a place among them” (Herbert et al., 2022), despite there being clear, albeit rare, examples that they did imagine such individuals. They elected Arab and Jewish members as far back as 1682 (Turkmani, 2011) and 1727 (Samuda, n.d.; Vieira, 2014), respectively, had at least one member who in 1781 admitted to being gay (Namier & Brooke, 1964; Onslow, n.d.), and elected Ardaseer Cursetjee, a marine engineer from Bombay, as a fellow in 1841 (Cursetjee, n.d.). The Royal Society counted pioneering women such as Margaret Cavendish among its speakers (1667; Wilkins, 2014) and Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) among the authors of its Philosophical Transactions (Herschel, 1787, 1794, 1796; Royal Society, 2017). A Jamaican mathematician, Francis Williams, was admitted to the meetings of the Royal Society, and, highlighting the importance of dissenting voices in attempting to overturn the status quo, he was proposed as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1721 – against a majority that rejected him on the basis of race (“on account of his complection [sic]”; Carretta, 2003; Williams, 1997).

Awesome. Some non-white, non-male people got into the Royal Society despite a majority rejecting them on the basis of race. That is not the win that Jussim thinks it is. It’s saying that it was easier for a mediocre white man to get into the Society than for an exceptional black man to do so. Maybe we should reject all barriers to entry that privilege white men, as DEI principles propose? How many great women and non-European people were deprived of opportunities historically?

The article concludes with a bit of pablum, rather than workable suggestions on where to go from here.

We have two choices. For scientists, those choices are simple. The first is whether to do honest science to the best of our abilities and help others to do the same, or to make science subservient to ideological goals which permit falsehoods as long as they serve the agenda. The second choice is whether to speak up when one sees a falsehood, because, as the epigraph to this article states, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid”. The idea, that voicing one’s views merits punishment is untenable, and needs to be scrapped. Similarly, the politicisation of science needs to stop.

Yes! Do honest science and help others! I can agree with that, although they go on to suggest that everyone else is pursuing ideological goals, unlike them, and are lying to serve the agenda. The problem is that Jussim et al. do have ideological goals that oppose our ability to serve others — they want science to support a conservative agenda. To that end, they are complaining about liberals, women, gay and trans people, Muslims, and anyone to the left of Charlie Kirk, and ignoring the active politicization and repression of science in America today.

It’s kind of a weird choice to get irate at gay women protesting about the discrimination they face at the hands of established conservative professors at a time when Trump is shutting down science funding and appointing looney tunes kooks to run our scientific institutions. But you do you, Lee Jussim, Mikhail Shifman, Luana Maroja, Jerry Coyne, David Bertioli, Arieh Warshel, Gernot Frenking, and Barry L. Bentley. Since you’re so committed to free speech, I’m sure you won’t mind if I say you’re all entitled, privileged, whiny-ass-titty-babies who are simply aligning yourselves with a dominant repressive and authoritarian culture. Assholes.

I should mention that Tomáš Hudlický died in 2022. It was not at the hands of fanatical liberal mob; he died of natural causes while holding the position of Professor and Canada Research Chair in Organic Synthesis and Biocatalysis at Brock University, shortly after giving a lecture at a conference.

English, do you speak it, Kelbie Murphy?

Dumbass

I don’t think she should graduate from college until she passes a basic English literacy test. She read a simple sentence in her “expensive” textbook and misinterpreted it.

Kelbie Murphy, a senior at the university, paid roughly $100 for an assigned textbook in her International Public Relations course. In Chapter 8, the opening passage reads: “An internet search produces the following modifier for identity: corporate, sexual, digital, public, racial, national, brand, and even Christian (a U.S.-based white supremacist group).”

“The way it was worded, it listed several marginalized groups, but then only called Christians to be White supremacists,” Murphy told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. “But the scariest thing is that the book was written in 2007.”

That’s not a particularly expensive textbook.

The fact that “identity” when modified by “Christian” refers to a racist, white supremacist organization outraged her because she couldn’t comprehend that “Christian identity” is a narrow subset of Christian thought, and thought it was maligning all of the Christian faith (although maybe it was an accurate misreading, that wasn’t what the textbook was saying). She got lots of views on TikTok, and even got highlighted on Fox News, two places where ignorance prospers.

Dan McClellan dismantles Murphy’s whole argument.

The University of North Georgia should be ashamed if they cave in to her lies.

He is embarrassingly tacky

We’re in the middle of a Republican shut down of the government, and Donald Trump is making ridiculous redecorating plans.

His other second-term developments include a gilded makeover for the White House, paving over the Rose Garden and constructing a $250m ballroom, as well as the clearing of homeless encampments throughout the capital.

Gilding the White House? Jesus fuck.

You could build a lot of low-income housing for $250 million. Just saying.

This is what he does in his free time?

He also wants to build a monument, the Arc de Trump.

US President Donald Trump wants to build a triumphal arch across from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, the latest in his efforts to make over the capital city in his style.

The so-called Arc de Trump would commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary next year and is reportedly being privately funded by Trump’s supporters.

He wants to build a pointless monument in just a year? You know it’s going to be cheaply and sloppily built, and will fall apart shortly afterwards. Plaster and lath, with gilding. Yuck. And who cares about laws and regulations? Not the Republicans.

Plans for Trump’s proposed arch are still taking shape but it is expected to be located across the Potomac River on federal land inside the district’s boundaries.

Developing a memorial in the District of Columbia is complex given its unique status as the capital city, according to Dr Christine Henry, director of the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

New commemorations typically need congressional approval as part of a 24-step plan developed by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which approves designs along with the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA).

Even the craven New York Times is calling this for what it is.

Critics, including a guest essayist for the New York Times, have called his Oval Office remodel a “Gilded Rococo Nightmare”.

I hope the next Democratic administration, if there is one, is prepared to budget for demolition and cleanup.

Encouraging news for Oklahoma

Ryan Walters, the superintendent of education who was trying to force Christianity on students — introducing PragerU trash into the curriculum, requiring Bibles (the Trump Bible, actually), etc. — resigned a short while ago. I assumed it was because he had been made a more lucrative offer by a conservative Christian organization, but it may have been a deeper problem than I thought.

Walters is being investigated by the state ethics commission! He had been abusing teacher licenses and firing people he didn’t like, among other fiscal irregularities. He had given high-paying positions to his friends, instead. Some of his actions are already being revoked.

Starting with the cases regarding teacher licenses. The board voted to dismiss several cases for revocations of teachers like Regan Killackey, the Edmond teacher who went somewhat viral last year after an Instagram post from five years prior came to light that showed his kid in a Trump mask and Killackey with a pirate sword, they were at a Halloween store around the holiday time.

The board also voted to dismiss the case of the teacher license revocation for Alison Scot, who also became a target under Walters when she commented on someone’s social media post regarding the assassination attempt of President Trump.

Also cool: the Oklahoma education website, which once promised all this crap about Bibles and PragerU, is already being revised, and his weird religious programming is already beginning to disappear.

As Sam Seder mentions above, this suggests that the Oklahoma citizenry aren’t as far gone as we feared — they’ve been quietly fighting back all along, and we’re starting to see the bad policies of the Walters era being rolled back. Maybe they’re getting tired of being the 50th worst education state in the country.

The latest medical nonsense

Well. Now we have another cause of autism. Thanks, RFK jr!

There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol, Kennedy stated during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.

That man is just incredibly stupid. He doesn’t understand cause and effect, he doesn’t understand correlation, and he doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t make off-the-cuff remarks drawing unfounded conclusions.

One of the papers he claims support his conclusion is direct that it is a correlational study, and it doesn’t even look at tylenol use.

The 2013 study looked at circumcision rates in boys versus autism rates. The authors admitted that national and state averages may show correlation, not causation, and said their study may have mistakes, bias and confounding. “Circumcision practices are also tied to culture and religion, which also affect autism diagnoses and health care use,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News.

Another expert brings up a rather salient point.

“There is absolutely no studies establishing any causality,” Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder and medical director of Ocean Pediatrics, told CBS News. “While some observational studies suggest possibly an association, there’s no studies (showing causality) — and the conclusion by any credible medical resource is agreeing that there’s no causal relationship between Tylenol, circumcisions or vaccines to autism.”
…
“We almost never, ever use Tylenol after circumcision,” Abelowitz said, adding he’s performed about 10,000 circumcisions across his 30 years of practice.

Fire that guy.

By the way, circumcision is a pointless cosmetic procedure that you shouldn’t do anyway, but not because it causes autism.

I have evidence that spiders are posting on the internet

This ‘person,’ David Love, is definitely a spider.

Female spiders possess structures in their reproductive tracts called spermathecae that are used to store sperm. Humans lack them, and in fact, the human female reproductive tract is hostile to the survival of sperm. From this, I am forced to surmise that David Love is, in fact, a spider — and further, a female spider.

Alternatively, many other invertebrates have spermathecae, so it’s possible that he is instead a hermaphroditic earthworm.

Megyn Kelly is deeply weird

Remember when Megyn Kelly was deeply offended at the suggestion that Santa Claus wasn’t white? It’s an imaginary figure, yet she insisted he was white.

Now she’s doing it again. Jezebel commissioned Etsy to put a curse on Charlie Kirk, which is already silly (you know, curses don’t work, right?)

I want to make it clear, I’m not calling on dark forces to cause him harm. I just want him to wake up every morning with an inexplicable zit. I want his podcast microphone to malfunction every time he hits record. I want his blue blazers to suddenly all be one size too small. I want one of his socks to always be sliding down his foot. I want his thumb to grow too big to tweet. To ruin his day with the collective feminist power of the Etsy coven would be my life’s greatest joy.

It’s silly, it’s stupid, it’s a joke. But then Kirk was shot, and the gullible reared back, aghast, certain that this was confirmation that curses actually work. No, it’s not. This is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

All it tells us is that the person promoting the idea has a prior belief in the power of curses, and is presenting a random fact as evidence for that belief.

So what does Megyn Kelly believe?

First of all, Christians are opposed to casting spells or contacting the spirit world – not only because they believe there is only one God, but because they acknowledge the existence of the devil and evil spirits. Fr. Mike Schmitz actually talked about this when he joined me back in episode 399.

He basically explained how you are playing with fire with this stuff. There actually are demons in this world. Calling up the spirit world – in particular the devil’s spirit world – can have real-world consequences. It is not something to mess with. This is very dangerous. It is not a game. It is literally evil.

Demons aren’t real. Neither is Santa Claus. It is literally goofy, but Kelly believes in them. But then she goes on to undermine her own beliefs.

Second, and this is what I want the people at Jezebel to know, Erika and Charlie Kirk heard about these curses, and it really rattled Erika in particular. She knew Christian teaching on this subject. She loved Charlie absolutely. She was scared when she heard of the curses Jezebel had culled up. So much so that she and Charlie contacted a friend – who I believe she said was a Catholic priest – and asked him to pray with them and over Charlie… the night before he was murdered.

She eventually worked it through, and so did Charlie, that, as she told me, “weapons will form but not prosper,” that “satan and those witches have no power.” Of course, God’s will is the one that matters, and his blessing over Charlie was real and palpable. All you had to do was spend time with him to know that.

OK, if I took this at all seriously, the Kirks brought in a priest to officially negate a curse to give him a zit, and instead Charlie got shot in the neck. Following Kelly’s logic, does that mean that the Catholic church is less powerful than a coven of Etsy witches? Is this confirmation that Etsy curses are real and powerful?

As usual, these weird fantasies vanish in a puff of contradictions. Megyn Kelly doesn’t care, though, all she wants to do is rationalize hating the people she disagrees with. They’re evil, don’t you know. It also gives her an opportunity to engage in melodramatic theatrics.

It’s Tylenol?

RFK jr claimed over a month ago that this month they were going to find and announce the cause of autism. We all knew he was full of shit — he’s permanently full to the eyebrows with shit — and that this was a political game they were playing, because autism is a multifactorial syndrome with multiple enabling factors, and you’re not going to find a ‘magic bullet’ for it. Well, yesterday the gang of frauds and liars in the White House announced that there was a central link, and that it was acetaminophen, or Tylenol. This is like announcing that the cause is consuming bread — something with a widespread, long-term use that a huge number of pregnant women had eaten. Mothers with autistic children will now think that using a common, well-tested pain reliever is the cause, and blame themselves.

Trump gathered his crack team of worthless quacks to make this announcement.

Speaking from the Oval Office alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump did not keep his remarks to Tylenol during pregnancy. (I don’t know who the woman is, I guess no one thinks she’s important enough to name)

Of course Trump tried to take credit for this “discovery”.

It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby, Trump said, without providing further evidence.

Extensive research has shown that there’s no link between vaccines and autism.

Trump thanked Kennedy for bringing autism to the forefront of American politics, along with me. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has promoted discredited theories that vaccines cause autism.

We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it, Trump said.

Oh god. All the gullible people who believed him about ivermectin are now going to be telling pregnant women that they just have to suffer through headaches and fevers, all because a group of elected and appointed clowns say so. They presented no evidence for a link between autism and Tylenol, but just blithely charged in and invented one. The studies have been done to show that Tylenol is not a significant factor! Here’s one that looked at 2,480,797 children and found no connection.

Study reveals no causal link between neurodevelopmental disorders and acetaminophen exposure before birth
NIH-funded research in siblings finds previously reported connection is likely due to other underlying factors.

Acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy is not linked to the risk of developing autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability, according to a new study of data from more than 2 million children in Sweden. The collaborative research effort by Swedish and American investigators, which appears in JAMA, is the largest of its kind and was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Scientists compared siblings — who share genetics and other variables such as parental health, environmental exposures, and socioeconomic factors — and were able to limit the influence of other potential risk factors. This allowed them to focus specifically on, and eliminate, the risk associated with acetaminophen. The study design was unique due to the size of the population captured in the Swedish Medical Birth Register and the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register. Before siblings were considered, there appeared to be a small increase in risk for neurodevelopmental disorders in children exposed to acetaminophen, which was noted in previous studies.

Acetaminophen is commonly used as a pain reliever and fever reducer and is found in a variety of medicines available over the counter and via prescription. It is often taken during pregnancy instead of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, which can cause low levels of amniotic fluid, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The reasons pregnant people might take acetaminophen, including fever, or conditions such as chronic migraine, could be, and in some cases are, associated with an increased risk for later neurodevelopmental disorders following pregnancy.

One limitation of this study is that it relies on data from prescribed acetaminophen and from self-reporting from pregnant people during prenatal care. It may not capture all use or dosage in all people, particularly over-the-counter medicines. However, the number of patients included in the study sample and the ability to control for many other confounding factors support the conclusion that acetaminophen is not directly linked to an increase link of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability.

To inform best preventative strategies, additional research is required to fully understand the genetic and non-genetic factors that increase the risk of autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability.

The effect is simply not there! Because Trump has surrounded himself with incompetent frauds, this claim is going to resonate through society and have multiple deleterious effects on American health. Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and RFK jr belong on a list of infamous quacks alongside disgraced “doctor” Andrew Wakefield.

Charlie Kirk shot

A single shot was fired at Kirk during one of his rants at Utah Valley University, striking him in the neck.

Apparently, he’s still alive.

No automatic or semi-automatic fire? No bump stock? No large magazine? Violent liberals really need to learn more about the gear the Right embraces so readily.

Thoughts and prayers! Nothing more!

You guys didn’t pray hard enough. He’s dead.

This is bad news. Not only does no one deserve to be murdered, but this is going to be used to blame everyone the Right hates.

Remember what he believed.

“Renowned scientists and scholars” who deserve shaming

There’s a new book out to defend science, titled uncreatively The War on Science, by Lawrence Krauss. The theme is nothing new: I’d recommend instead The War on Science by Shawn Otto, or The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, both of which are well-researched single-author works that more objectively examine the people and processes that are literally targeting the institutions of science for destruction.

Krauss’s book stands out because it is completely different. Most people discussing the war on science talk about the influence of dark money, or capitalist motivations to sacrifice long term investment for short term profit, or lobby groups that shape the government for personal gain, or the undermining of the educational system to generate an uninformed citizenry. They talk about specific initiatives by special interest groups that are counter to good science. They discuss the malignant influence of reactionary religious organizations.

Not Krauss!

He has gathered 39 contributors, calling them “renowned scientists and scholars,” who are instead petty, entitled whiners who have personal grievances against the social institutions that have alienated them from the mainstream. It’s written by sex pests, racists, bigots, and defenders of genocide. They don’t like the fact that senior scientists are told not to sexually abuse junior faculty and students. They don’t like the fact that people with different ethnic backgrounds hold protests on their campuses. They resent being expected to respect aboriginal peoples in their research. They are horrified that better informed people are rejecting their old bigotries and recognizing that gender is on a spectrum. They all think that Woke is the enemy of science, and that hordes of Leftists have been battering the Ivory Tower to bring it down.

They’re all idiots.

They also have very bad timing. This series of screeds against the evils of the Left was published this summer, after the Right took control of the government and began to literally wreck science in this country, revoking grants, punishing universities, giving control of the NIH and NSF and CDC and NASA to political hacks who began dictating new directions for science, telling libraries what books they’re allowed to stock, deporting scientists and students who weren’t sufficiently “American” for their taste, enabling more religious influence into government, and basically trashing the Constitution. So now we have this book on the shelves screaming about an apocalyptic threat from gay and transgender scientists at a time when far-right conservatives are flexing their muscles and sending troops to university campuses.

Hemant Mehta has summarized multiple reviews of this wrong-headed book, and the defenses of its authors. They recognize that their timing was ludicrously bad, and all of the authors make the same goddamn stupid argument.

We wrote it before Trump was elected again, and we had no idea the Republicans would do this.

Larry Krauss has been an embarrassment for a long time.

That’s no excuse, and if you’re so ignorant you couldn’t see the Right’s agenda, despite the fact that people have been writing about it for decades, then you are in no position to publish a book that so thoroughly misses the point. And they’re still arguing even now that the True Danger is Wokeness, as Trump tears their institutions down around them.

For an example of how pig-headedly idiotic the authors are, Hemant quotes Jerry Coyne.

The book was put together before Trump began his assault on universities by punishing science grantees and by appointing people like RFK Jr. to science positions. I expected that, after this unpredictable bout of executive-branch bullying, there would be some wokesters who adopted a “whataboutery stance,” saying, “This book largely comprises attacks on how the progressive Left wing is eroding science. But Trump is dong much more damage from the Right.” And right now that is indeed the case, but Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed), the government will cut back strongly on interfering in the funding and production.

The effect of the Right on science, then, will probably be more temporary. In contrast, that from the Left will last a lot longer, for progressive professors who believe in nonsense like a spectrum of sex in animals will teach this nonsense to their students, and thus it will pass among academic generations. We simply cannot sit by and let progressives distort science in the cause of ideology, regardless of what the Right is doing.

(I hope Jerry is enjoying the sight of the National Guard patrolling his campus, the fucking moron.)

Unbelievable.

Hemant has an excellent summary of this abomination of a book.

The War on Science isn’t a defense of reason. It’s a monument to intellectual cowardice. Its authors, armed with petty grievances about pronouns and diversity programs, aimed their intellectual firepower on paper cuts that exist only in their minds while everyone around them is being decapitated. They act like the biggest problems in science involve grad students asking for inclusive policies, professors acknowledging biological complexity, or institutions offering STEM scholarships to underrepresented groups.

To publish such a book now, in the face of deliberate and systemic sabotage from the highest levels of government, is not only ridiculous, it’s malpractice for any half-decent scientist or science communicator. Even Jordan Peterson should be embarrassed—and that’s saying something.

Every page wasted on performative outrage over “wokeness” is a page that could have been used to sound the alarm about the real, ongoing destruction of the scientific world. And given that many of these authors have spent the past few years appealing to right-wing bigots, that could have been extremely useful.

Instead, by pretending that the greatest threat to science comes from progressive inclusion rather than authoritarian arson, Krauss and his allies have given cover to those who would dismantle our research institutions. They’re compiling propaganda for those who want to bury science under the weight of their own ignorance. They are enablers who fiddle with culture war nonsense while the laboratories burn.

Meanwhile, like most of the professors I know, I’ll continue to teach that the development of sex is a complex, gradual process with multiple variations and that gender is a social and psychological process expressed as a continuum, not because of ideology, but because that’s what the evidence says. At least, I’ll do that until I hear the jackboots marching down my hallway and the Republicans shut down my liberal arts university.

For now, though, here is the list of authors of this terrible book, every one a disgrace. Remember them. They aren’t going anywhere, and we should be prepared to publicly shame them at every opportunity.

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