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\n Photo: Pete Kiehart\/The New York Times\/Redux\n <\/p>\n
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<\/a> of people from death by COVID alone. That is reality, and that\u2019s not where Kennedy lives. The secretary of Health and Human Services said<\/a> that mRNA research \u201cposes more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses\u201d although it doesn\u2019t. Within the \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d universe, the Kennedy brain worm<\/a> rules. Outside it, the Earth is still round. Vaccines do not cause autism, antidepressants do not behave like heroin, and seed oils are not<\/a> dangerous. Raw milk can make you sick<\/a>, 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<\/a> in new grants from the National Institutes of Health, and it has frozen<\/a> billions in research funds to public universities.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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<\/a> cancer-fighting supplement made from fruit pits. Libertarian groups like the Goldwater Institute want to expand \u201cright to try\u201d laws, which are designed to give the terminally ill access to experimental drugs that may hurt more than help, and they\u2019ve got the president\u2019s attention. Trump signed a federal right-to-try law<\/a> in 2018 and touted it at the Republican National Convention last year, but there\u2019s no evidence it has helped anyone live a longer, healthier life.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> they were to get vaccinated against COVID. Beyond the medical field, the rationalist\u2019s great foil \u2014 the creationist \u2014 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<\/a> programs in state after state, funding private and home schools that teach creationism.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s 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 \u2014 or was \u2014 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 \u201cemerging threat\u201d 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\u2019s 2008 sex-crimes conviction. Epstein always had young women around him, Krauss told<\/a> an interviewer in 2011, but \u201cas a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.\u201d In 2016, he quietly wrote<\/a> a birthday letter to his old pal, and two years after that, the hammer fell \u2014 this time on his own head. BuzzFeed News reported<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Krauss does not mention this\u00a0in his introduction to The War on Science. The reader is left to assume that Krauss \u2014 and his 39 contributors \u2014 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\u2019t creationism but science itself. One contributor, the biologist and prominent New Atheist Jerry Coyne, halfway admitted this on X. \u201cA 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,\u201d Coyne wrote<\/a> before taking a final shot at \u201cprogressives.\u201d You can\u2019t defend reality if you aren\u2019t willing to live in it.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 it\u2019s 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 \u201cscience advances,\u201d while other disciplines, like \u201ctheology, philosophy, sociology,\u201d do not. \u201cScience is the jewel in humanity\u2019s crown,\u201d he adds, and that is why trans people must not be indulged. Chromosomes are destiny. The \u201cbelligerent slogan\u201d that \u201ctrans women are women\u201d is therefore \u201cscientifically false, a debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women,\u201d Dawkins writes.<\/p>\n That idea appears again and again. The writers say they\u2019re 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\u2019t. There is no evidence that trans women in single-sex bathrooms represent a real and systematic threat to the safety of others \u2014 not in the U.S<\/a>. 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 \u201crapid-onset gender dysphoria\u201d 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 \u201cimmediately ignited an explosion of activist-driven controversy,\u201d they complain, but this is not the full story. Littman\u2019s methodology was so badly flawed<\/a> that she had to republish the paper with a correction that undermined her original conclusion. The research<\/a> we do have on detransition suggests that rates are very low.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cspew out a ton of information, accurate or not,\u201d that opponents had \u201cno possibility of refuting in the time available,\u201d Scott told<\/a> the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Trump is prone to the Gish gallop, and so is Kennedy. It\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u2019s primary case. In a chapter on the dangers of \u201cdesexed language\u201d in research and science communication, the professor Karleen Gribble says that some organizations \u201cavoided giving any indication a procedure might be sex-specific,\u201d like when the Canadian Cancer Society \u201csimply said\u201d that \u201cif you\u2019ve ever been sexually active, you should start having regular Pap tests by the time you\u2019re 21.\u201d<\/p>\n That text does appear in a 2014 Facebook post<\/a> by the society, as Gribble quotes it. But it\u2019s attached to a graphic that quite prominently refers to \u201cwomen.\u201d 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 \u201ccancellation.\u201d After an investigation characterized by \u201cpostmodernist intersectional social theory,\u201d 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\u2019s reporting \u201cwas sensationalized, superficial, and biased towards the perceived victims,\u201d Ott complains, and it ruined him. What did BuzzFeed actually report<\/a>? 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The bullshit doesn\u2019t 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 \u201ccalling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard\u2019s rules of bullying and harassment,\u201d Gay said<\/a> that \u201cit can,\u201d before adding, \u201cit depends on the context.\u201d It\u2019s Gay\u2019s 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 \u201cliberal democracy\u201d in the Middle East, he insists, though by what metric, he never says. He can offer only canard after canard \u2014 sophistry that, in the case of Gaza, is both intellectually and morally obscene.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was \u201cabout science,\u201d not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists \u201c\u200b\u200bbut a group of atheist Marxist biologists\u201d 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 <\/a>sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics.<\/p>\n Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology\u00a0these 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 \u201creal\u201d in this world; that\u2019s how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say<\/a> that the U.S. \u201cwould be better off with fewer Asians\u201d while calling<\/a> herself a \u201crace realist.\u201d The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There\u2019s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry\u2019s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, \u201cdisagreeing with the New Atheists \u2014 opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior \u2014 meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Dawkins is not wrong on trans rights simply because he\u2019s wrong about science, although that\u2019s 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<\/a>, how \u201cbabby\u201d forms, \u201chow girl get pragnent.\u201d Science! Well, not really. Babby cannot exist without sperm and egg, but that doesn\u2019t mean queer and non-procreative sex is dangerous or deviant or that we should ban it because a Sunday-school teacher doesn\u2019t like it. If people\u2019s feelings are all that determine who is free and who isn\u2019t, the result is often illiberalism.<\/p>\n