Imagine some people in your neighborhood are mixed up in organized crime—say drug trafficking. Some locals decide to blow the whistle because they worry that the whole community will get a bad reputation, and they start urging everyone else to speak up too. Most people, though, just keep their heads down, understandably reluctant to pick a fight with the gang leaders and their enablers.
And then someday a new mayor arrives in town, eager to look tough on crime. In a big show of force, he has the entire neighborhood raided. Dozens are arrested, including plenty of people who did nothing wrong. Shops are shut down, and community leaders are strong-armed into accepting harsh, sweeping measures against anything that looks even remotely suspicious.
Now, what would you think of someone who blamed the internal whistleblowers as follows:
“Why did you bad-mouth your own neighborhood when a much bigger threat was looming on the horizon? You kept harping about some petty crime that may or may not have happened, while the police were gearing up for a massive crackdown. You didn’t see where the real danger was coming from.”
That, in a nutshell, is the reaction from a lot of left-leaning academics and journalists to The War On Science, a new collection edited by the physicist Lawrence Krauss, to which I contributed a chapter along with 38 others (including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal, Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja and Carole Hooven).
The collection, written and assembled before Donald Trump’s re-election, argues that scientific institutions have been increasingly captured by left-wing ideology: prestigious journals announcing the screening of submissions on political grounds; activists canceling and deplatforming speakers who stray from orthodoxy; Ivy League universities punishing students for using the wrong pronouns or other speech violations; professional societies embracing progressive doctrines on sex and gender that clash with their own disciplines’ evidence, and so on.
In short, we’re describing an internal assault on science, largely waged from within academia—a contemporary version of what student leader Rudi Dutschke once called a “long march through the institutions.”
In the time between the writing and publishing of our book, however, Donald Trump was re-elected as president, and started to launch a very different kind of “war on science” of his own: cracking down on prestigious institutions, slashing research funding on anything that smacks of progressive causes, and threatening scientific journals to scrap DEI initiatives and reinstate strict meritocracy.
So, is it true, as the kids say, that our book “didn’t age well,” becoming cringe-worthy and out of touch even before it hit the shelves? How could we have been so oblivious to the looming right-wing assault on science while we were preoccupied with left-wing critiques?
[Read the rest of this piece on Substack]
I previously published my chapter here on Substack, including all my sources (ignored by New York Magazine). And here’s my own interview with Lawrence Krauss about my chapter:
If you want to read the whole thing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Or just buy the whole book of course, and you’ll get 38 other perspectives on the ideological attacks on science! 😉