Scientific American chief editor Laura Helmuth apologized Friday for her utterly classless Election Night rants against Donald Trump and his voters. Itâ€s a start, but a lot of self-examination needs to follow. [emphasis, links added]
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.â€
Sheâ€s in her 50s and sheâ€s still obsessed with high school?
Helmuth vented at least three times on Bluesky (one of those X alternatives for libs who canâ€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 itâ€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 canâ€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.â€
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.
Read more at NY Post
