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On Tuesday evening, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Department of Health and Human Services had canceled a half-billion dollars in vaccine development. The affected projects all use mRNA technology, an advance that saved millions of people from death by COVID alone. That is reality, and that’s not where Kennedy lives. The secretary of Health and Human Services said that mRNA research “poses more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses” although it doesn’t. Within the “Make America Healthy Again” universe, the Kennedy brain worm rules. Outside it, the Earth is still round. Vaccines do not cause autism, antidepressants do not behave like heroin, and seed oils are not dangerous. Raw milk can make you sick, or even kill you, and cod-liver oil will never cure the measles. MAHA cannot undo these facts, but it can bury the truth in so many lies that reality becomes elusive. The brain worm is in power, via Kennedy, and science is on the defense. By May, the Trump administration had cut $2.3 billion in new grants from the National Institutes of Health, and it has frozen billions in research funds to public universities.

The war on science has entered a grave new era, but it did not begin with the reelection of Donald Trump. Kennedy, the rotten princeling, has been a fixture of American pseudoscience for decades. There is no MAHA without him or the health-freedom movement, with its anti-vaccine paranoia, or the spread of homeopathy and naturopathy and chiropractic treatments, which benefit no one but whoever sends the invoice. Though quackery is not inherently partisan, it always appealed to the far right: Members of the John Birch Society once promoted Laetrile, a fraudulent cancer-fighting supplement made from fruit pits. Libertarian groups like the Goldwater Institute want to expand “right to try” laws, which are designed to give the terminally ill access to experimental drugs that may hurt more than help, and they’ve got the president’s attention. Trump signed a federal right-to-try law in 2018 and touted it at the Republican National Convention last year, but there’s no evidence it has helped anyone live a longer, healthier life.

Later, when COVID struck, far-right conspiracy theorists convinced thousands to eat horse dewormer and hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that cannot treat coronavirus. The MAGA world descended even further into conspiracy with dramatic consequences for public health. The less conservative media a person consumed, the likelier they were to get vaccinated against COVID. Beyond the medical field, the rationalist’s great foil — the creationist — is still powerful, which is a testament to the enduring strength of the Christian right. Just over a third of Americans believe that God created human beings within the past 10,000 years, and of that group, most say they are politically conservative. Republican legislators are expanding voucher programs in state after state, funding private and home schools that teach creationism.

So it’s a strange time to read The War on Science, a new anthology edited by the physicist and New Atheist writer Lawrence Krauss. In atheist and skeptic circles, Krauss is — or was — known not only for his work on the cosmos but for his campaign against creationism and for science education. Now Krauss and his collaborators have identified an “emerging threat” to science and inquiry, as he writes in an introduction to the book. What threat? Wokeness, of course. Universities prize diversity over merit, while hysterics confuse words with violence and brave truth-tellers risk cancellation. Krauss does know something about cancellation, at least. A former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, he was still defending the predator well after Epstein’s 2008 sex-crimes conviction. Epstein always had young women around him, Krauss told an interviewer in 2011, but “as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” In 2016, he quietly wrote a birthday letter to his old pal, and two years after that, the hammer fell — this time on his own head. BuzzFeed News reported that Krauss had been the subject of sexual-harassment and -misconduct allegations for about a decade. He retired from Arizona State University after an investigation into his behavior. Now he has a Substack.

Krauss does not mention this in his introduction to The War on Science. The reader is left to assume that Krauss — and his 39 contributors — cares only for the integrity of science. They are beings of reason, united not by ideology, which is the refuge of a weak mind, but by the purity of their logic. Contributors include Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson; others, like the skeptic and philosopher Maarten Boudry, may be less familiar. Many are atheists, while others, like Ferguson, have converted to Christianity. All are convinced of their own brilliance. Alas, our rationalists each face the same problem, the most obvious of many: Their anthology came out in July during a real war on science. Most contributors, Krauss included, have railed against DEI, and critical race theory, and social justice for years. Now their arguments are shaping policy, and the casualty isn’t creationism but science itself. One contributor, the biologist and prominent New Atheist Jerry Coyne, halfway admitted this on X. “A new book on the ideological threats to science (from the Left). And yes, we know that right now the Right poses a much more serious danger to science,” Coyne wrote before taking a final shot at “progressives.” You can’t defend reality if you aren’t willing to live in it.

There are nearly 40 chapters in The War on Science, all pockmarked by omissions, misrepresentations, and, sometimes, obvious lies. Each section of the anthology addresses a different facet of the woke threat to reason, but a few common obsessions emerge: Genitals and what people do with them, Israel, DEI, and various professional insults — it’s all here, boomer Facebook on every page. The writers invoke the philosopher Judith Butler, but only by name, and their work on gender is never explained, quoted, or even paraphrased. Our rationalists are too sophisticated to bother with the effort. In one interminable entry, Dawkins insists that “science advances,” while other disciplines, like “theology, philosophy, sociology,” do not. “Science is the jewel in humanity’s crown,” he adds, and that is why trans people must not be indulged. Chromosomes are destiny. The “belligerent slogan” that “trans women are women” is therefore “scientifically false, a debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women,” Dawkins writes.

That idea appears again and again. The writers say they’re defending free speech and inquiry, but also, some speech is bad, mostly because it is unscientific. To avoid the scent of hypocrisy, they insist that bad speech is more than an irritation; it is dangerous. They never land the argument. They can’t. There is no evidence that trans women in single-sex bathrooms represent a real and systematic threat to the safety of others — not in the U.S. or in the U.K., where Dawkins lives. The philosopher Alex Byrne, writing with bioethicist Moti Gorin, cites a 2018 paper by researcher Lisa Littman on “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in minors, an idea they are keen to resurrect. If trans minors are victims of social contagion, their identities are inauthentic and they may detransition later on, or so the argument usually goes. Littman “immediately ignited an explosion of activist-driven controversy,” they complain, but this is not the full story. Littman’s methodology was so badly flawed that she had to republish the paper with a correction that undermined her original conclusion. The research we do have on detransition suggests that rates are very low.

In 1994, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education coined the phrase Gish gallop to describe a debate tactic common among creationists. Practitioners would “spew out a ton of information, accurate or not,” that opponents had “no possibility of refuting in the time available,” Scott told the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Trump is prone to the Gish gallop, and so is Kennedy. It’s not hard to see why: An opponent has to decide, quickly, which bullshit to respond to and which she must table for another time. She usually cannot rebut each lie point by point, as Mehdi Hasan pointed out in his recent book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. I thought about the Gish gallop probably a dozen times while I read The War on Science. Though I cannot refute each lie or sloppy argument in a single essay, in the tradition of skeptics I will highlight a few additional howlers that compose the book’s primary case. In a chapter on the dangers of “desexed language” in research and science communication, the professor Karleen Gribble says that some organizations “avoided giving any indication a procedure might be sex-specific,” like when the Canadian Cancer Society “simply said” that “if you’ve ever been sexually active, you should start having regular Pap tests by the time you’re 21.”

That text does appear in a 2014 Facebook post by the society, as Gribble quotes it. But it’s attached to a graphic that quite prominently refers to “women.” Some social-media manager probably assumed that the average reader would see the graphic, read it, and understand that women get Pap smears, but not Gribble. The lie weakens her integrity. Elsewhere, Christian Ott, a former Caltech professor, writes about his 2017 “cancellation.” After an investigation characterized by “postmodernist intersectional social theory,” Caltech found that he had violated Title IX and university policies by harassing grad students. Then BuzzFeed News came calling, as it would later do for Krauss. The site’s reporting “was sensationalized, superficial, and biased towards the perceived victims,” Ott complains, and it ruined him. What did BuzzFeed actually report? Ott never fully explains, but Google still exists. Ott, it turns out, had fallen in love with one of his grad students, and then fired her, and he complained obsessively about the woman to a different female student. Caltech knew this because it had Ott’s messages along with his Tumblr account, where he had published 86 poems about the student he loved. Ott does not mention his poetry, but at the end of his chapter, he does thank his wife for her support.

The bullshit doesn’t end here. Boudry, the philosopher, begins a chapter on the illiberalism of pro-Palestine activists by quoting former Harvard president Claudine Gay. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay if “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” Gay said that “it can,” before adding, “it depends on the context.” It’s Gay’s use of context that enrages Boudry, who desires the unequivocal condemnation of something that did not actually happen at Harvard. He does not include a single example of students calling for the extermination of Jews there or anywhere else, nor does he prove one of his central claims, which is that there is a systematic pattern of antisemitism on campus after campus. Israel is the only “liberal democracy” in the Middle East, he insists, though by what metric, he never says. He can offer only canard after canard — sophistry that, in the case of Gaza, is both intellectually and morally obscene.

So much for New Atheism, sic transit gloria mundi. Though New Atheism as a brand had mostly devoured itself by 2016, the ideas it professed, and conflicts it waged, have become more relevant than its individual celebrities. The long road to MAGA and the present war on science winds through the work of New Atheism, at least in part. To be an atheist, as I am, a person concludes there is no God. Atheism is not a political position on its own, even if it does have ideological implications, but New Atheism is something else altogether. As the historian Erik Baker wrote for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was “about science,” not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists “​​but a group of atheist Marxist biologists” in the 1970s, as Baker wrote. The conflict was ideological. Sociobiologists said that our genes explained our behavior, choices, and capacity to reason. Opponents like the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould identified sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics.

Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore “real” in this world; that’s how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. “would be better off with fewer Asians” while calling herself a “race realist.” The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There’s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry’s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, “disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.”

Dawkins is not wrong on trans rights simply because he’s wrong about science, although that’s part of it. We have always been more than our chromosomes. In a free society, people can express themselves however they choose, so long as they do not endanger others. His argument is no more sophisticated than anything devised by the so-called ex-gay movement, which makes its own claim to rationality. Heterosexuality is more natural than any alternative. The penis is meant to go in the vagina; that is, to paraphrase one famous social-media post, how “babby” forms, “how girl get pragnent.” Science! Well, not really. Babby cannot exist without sperm and egg, but that doesn’t mean queer and non-procreative sex is dangerous or deviant or that we should ban it because a Sunday-school teacher doesn’t like it. If people’s feelings are all that determine who is free and who isn’t, the result is often illiberalism.

And that is where The War on Science finds itself. The Palestine exception to free speech existed well before October 7, 2023, and trans adults and youth have experienced authoritarian repression for years. By the time Krauss and his contributors started to put this cursed anthology together, conservative-run states were forcing queer teachers into the closet and forcibly detransitioning trans minors. Some families had already fled across state lines to get health care for their children. Teachers had lost jobs and faced extra scrutiny and harassment for teaching about civil rights, or the real history of slavery, and for assigning books some parents didn’t like. If that did not register to Krauss and his collaborators as a noteworthy war on inquiry or expression, perhaps that’s because they agreed with it. Put another way: If trans people don’t deserve the right to expression, there’s nothing to see here — move along. The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms. The War on Science is not remarkable for what it gets wrong, then, but for the work it is trying to do. In Krauss’s more recent writings, he does not accept Trump’s war on research wholesale, but he can’t escape himself, either. As he notes in his introduction, he once complained in The Wall Street Journal that “the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health spent hundreds of millions of dollars on social justice initiatives instead of fulfilling their mandates of supporting scientific research.” He got what he wanted. So did his friends. Now what?

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Sarah Jones covers politics and labor.

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