Andrew Follett writes for National Review Online about some academics’ fears about the presidential election’s outcome.
Woke academics funneling scientific funding toward political activism are terrified President-elect Donald Trump is about to Make Science Great Again.
Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, responded to the news in a series of now-deleted tweets about Trump being her once and future president by stating, “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of f***ing fascists” and urging “solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f*** them to the moon and back.” (Asterisks ours, not hers.)
Helmuth’s live-tweeted breakdown concluded with her asking advice “for what workplaces can do to help people who are devastated by the election,” showing that the activists attempting to take over science suddenly find themselves threatened. Helmuth is now leaving the publication.
Such activists have in recent years infiltrated even the hard sciences. They helped convince publications such as Scientific American and Nature to openly endorse Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, an action that even the Atlantic — which also endorsed Harris —admitted “undermines trust in expertise.” Records show that 93 perent of political donations from higher-education professionals went to Harris or other Democratic candidates.
Left unsaid is the clear worry that the massive taxpayer gravy train for left-wing causes masquerading as science is coming to an end. Government funders of science like the National Science Foundation openly admit they have paid $270 million since 2001 to introduce the intersectional framework of critical race theory into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
And to be clear, this money has rendered American science increasingly untrustworthy.“Perhaps one of my biggest worries . . . is that Trump will be another nail in the coffin for trust in science,” given his anti-science rhetoric, Lisa Schipper, a geographer at the University of Bonn in Germany specializing in global warming, told Nature. Nature goes on to worry about a Pew Research survey finding trust in science has fallen steadily since 2019.
