The Scientific American editor’s biased diatribes reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science.
Scientific American chief editor Laura Helmuth apologized Friday for her utterly classless Election Night rants against Donald Trump and his voters. It’s a start, but a lot of self-examination needs to follow.
And not just by her.
Her expletive-filled posts were plain embarrassing, e.g.: “Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f–k them to the moon and back.”
She’s in her 50s and she’s still obsessed with high school?
Helmuth vented at least three times on Bluesky (one of those X alternatives for libs who can’t bear disagreement), blaring her unprofessional lack of scientific detachment.
Then again, her mag endorsed Kamala Harris after breaking its 175-year streak of neutrality in 2020 to endorse Joe Biden — a clear sign it’s falling into the same extreme partisanship as most old-school media.
Indeed, a host of actual science journals — Nature, the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine — endorsed Biden in 2020.
Which brought an ugly blowback, surveys indicated: making Trump voters more suspicious of them on COVID.
Yet SciAm and Nature did it again with Harris this year.
All this virtue-signaling pleases the editors, but harms the institutions’ brands: If they can’t resist playing politics in public, what might they be doing behind the scenes when it comes to science?
Nature went so far as to call Trump — who gave us Operation Warp Speed, and its life-saving COVID vaccines — “anti-science.”
Fact is, the ideological insistence on calling science “settled” on everything from climate change (and what to do about it) to the wisdom of transing minors, is itself profoundly anti-scientific.
At this point, all these “science” journalists now need to prove that they have any real clue what science is actually about.