Scientific American chief editor Laura Helmuth apologized Friday for her utterly classless Election Night rants against Donald Trump and his voters. Itรขโฌs 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., รขโฌลSolidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because fรขโฌโk them to the moon and back.รขโฌ
Sheรขโฌs in her 50s and sheรขโฌs still obsessed with high school?
Helmuth vented at least three times on Bluesky (one of those X alternatives for libs who canรขโฌt 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 รขโฌโ a clear sign itรขโฌs falling into the same extreme partisanship as most old-school media.
Indeed, a host of actual science journals รขโฌโ Nature, the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine รขโฌโ 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 institutionsรขโฌ brands: If they canรขโฌt 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 รขโฌโ who gave us Operation Warp Speed, and its life-saving COVID vaccines รขโฌโ รขโฌลanti-science.รขโฌ
Fact is, the ideological insistence on calling science รขโฌลsettledรขโฌ on everything from climate change (and what to do about it) to the wisdom of โtransingโ minors is itself profoundly anti-scientific.
At this point, all these รขโฌลscienceรขโฌ journalists now need to prove that they have any real clue what science is actually about.
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