Big Science Joins US Democrat Party Campaign
Science journals and reporters—even those outside the US—position themselves to defeat Trump and elect Clinton to promote their leftist causes.
If there was ever any doubt that institutional “Big Science” was an arm of the Democrat party, take a look at the evidence in these news stories. While individual scientists may certainly have their own opinions, their leaders and the organs of institutional science propaganda don’t even pretend to be politically neutral any more. The gloves are off; they want to defeat Trump. They want to elect Clinton.
Donald Trump’s appeal should be a call to arms (Nature). Daniel Sarewitz is usually a thoughtful analyst, but in his column he refers to Donald Trump as an example of “blustering, xenophobic demogogues” that citizens should “undercut” for a “well-functioning democracy”. While Sarewitz makes a good point about historical debates after World War II between Vannevar Bush and Harley Kilgore about the role of science in a democracy, he doesn’t hide his bias. He considers “his [Trump’s] nomination as the Republican presidential candidate should be cause for serious reflection about what is going wrong in America.” Note: Nature is a British publication. Is it their business to get involved in US politics?
What Donald Trump has said about science – and why he’s wrong (New Scientist). Another British rag joins the Democrats, scouring Trump’s Twitter tweets for signs he is anti-science. The article posts a video of Clinton saying over and over in a loop, “I believe in science.” The gleam in her eye suggests she is pandering to the Science lobby, but New Scientist doesn’t care. They want her to win.
Adaptation to climate risks: Political affiliation matters (PhysOrg and Science Daily). It’s no secret that Democrats believe everything the climate alarmists say about global warming, while some Republicans differ with the scientific consensus. This article reports on “a new study” from Utrecht University in Amsterdam (another foreign academic interest group) that shows Democrat homeowners in New York City are more likely to buy flood insurance than Republican homeowners. Hear the subtext? There’s no question that the academics believe floods are likely due to human-caused climate change, and the wiser Democrats are preparing for it.
The Issue: Democrats Support Leftist Causes
Why does Big Science and Big Media align itself with the Democrats? A look at various issues explains why. Name an issue with ethics or policy implications, and you will find Democrats and Big Science institutions locking arms in common cause.
Fetal tissue. Listeners to the Family Research Council’s conservative Washington Watch program know about the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, headed by representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who has appeared on the program several times. The Panel has been following up on the Planned Parenthood scandal revealed by last year’s undercover videos of top P.P. officials bragging about the sale of baby body parts (one of them joked about wanting “a Lamborghini” from the profits). Nature couldn’t care less about the scandal and the laws P.P. has broken. They printed a letter worrying about how this “witch-hunt endangers infants and researchers and must end.” It’s a little weird to think that the Panel endangers infants; how can dismembered unborn children be endangered any worse than by the institution that killed them? The US political parties could hardly be more starkly divided. The Democrats ratified the most pro-abortion platform in their history at their convention, not only denying all rights to the unborn, but advocating repeal of the Hyde Amendment that for decades has prohibited taxpayer funding for abortion (even though Planned Parenthood receives millions in fungible money each year). The Republican Party, by contrast, passed the most conservative platform in its history. It’s obvious who the Editors of Nature are rooting for.
Abortion law. Speaking of abortion, Tom Davies in a piece on Medical Xpress rationalizes it. There’s no need for all these laws trying to limit abortion, he writes, because abortion is already on the decline. In the process, Davies takes shots at Mike Pence (now the Republican Vice Presidential candidate) and shows photos of ACLU activists and angry pro-abortion demonstrators. The bias is palpable, but this is supposed to be a medical news site. In another Medical Xpress article, the writer weeps for patients at Catholic hospitals who might have to “fend for themselves in seeking an abortion.” Yet forcing any person or institution to violate their conscience or religious convictions when they feel abortion is murder is a huge issue today. Where is the concern of the author for those pressured to violate their conscience or lose their religious liberty? Pretending that women are too stupid to know where to find an abortion, if they insist, is sexist.
Abortion racism. Try to imagine, if you will, any Democrat reacting in horror at the naked racism of the abortion industry revealed in this Breitbart News story, “Scientists’ Failure to Report Abortions as ‘Cause of Death’ Masks Massive Racial Disparities.” Far more blacks and Hispanics are aborted than whites, statistics in the article show, yet abortion is not listed as the cause of death. In Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary Hillary’s America currently playing in theaters (see trailer), he quotes Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (a blatant eugenicist yet hero to Hillary Clinton) saying that the purpose of abortion was to weed out unfit minorities, specifically blacks. D’Souza documents how the Democrats supported slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and segregation all the way till the 1960s when President Lyndon Johnson found it politically expedient to position his party as the defender of Civil Rights. Watch this black historian finger the real culprits in this clip from the film.
Chimeras: from Nature: “‘it’s amazing that this is going on,’” a developmental biologist from Rockefeller says, “because there are many related questions and ethical issues that should be debated publicly.” Popular Mechanics knows this, too: “Not surprisingly, ethical concerns abound.” So why is the Obama administration lifting restrictions on creating animal-human chimeras? The Big Media spin doctoring team is ready with answers. Live Science justifies why human-animal chimeras may be coming, giving only excuses for it, no criticisms. In a separate piece, Live Science confuses the question by equivocating with “3 human chimeras that already exist.” It changes the discussion from deliberate embryonic tampering to things like bone-marrow transplants or natural anomalies with twins. Those involve parts from other humans. They have nothing to do with human-animal chimeras.
Transgender sports. Why on earth would Big Science and their enablers in Big Science Media support the currently trendy push for transgender rights? What does that have to do with science? The only push for it is coming from the Democrats, like President Obama, whose executive mandate to include gender identity in Civil Rights laws will be made permanent by the Supreme Court if Clinton wins (Breitbart News). With reckless partisanship on the eve of the Olympic Games, New Scientist posted an entry titled, “Transgender Olympians in Rio don’t have an unfair advantage.” The author waves the flag of science, claiming that “The evidence shows that transgender women won’t outcompete other female athletes.” But they’re not females! They have male body parts and male muscle mass, with all the advantages that led to gender-separated contests in the first place (e.g., gymnastics, weightlifting, swimming). They just identify with females. In Democrat Party rules of political correctness, one is not allowed to question anyone’s self-identification under threat of being called a bigot (watch this video for a glimpse into the extremes of PC indoctrination at a US university). But to Republicans, sex differences are intuitively obvious and empirically binary. Except for a tiny fraction with genetic abnormalities, the evidence is right in the groin and in the chromosomes. Every parent knows the physical and emotional distinctions between girls and boys. Science Daily bumped into the lamppost of reality in its report on a London study, “Infants prefer toys typed to their gender.” This was undoubtedly a surprise to any of the researchers who might believe (like US Democrats) that gender is merely a cultural construct that should be a matter of personal preference, changeable at will. Conservative Breitbart News pointed to a statement by the American College of Pediatricians that says it is unscientific to allege that a human can be born into the wrong body. The statement staunchly recommends against the transgender political culture being pushed by the Democrat party and Obama administration:
The treatment of GD in childhood with hormones effectively amounts to mass experimentation on, and sterilization of, youth who are cognitively incapable of providing informed consent. There is a serious ethical problem with allowing irreversible, life-changing procedures to be performed on minors who are too young to give valid consent themselves; adolescents cannot understand the magnitude of such decisions.
Ethics alone demands an end to the use of pubertal suppression with GnRH agonists, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries in children and adolescents. The College recommends an immediate cessation of these interventions, as well as an end to promoting gender ideology via school curricula and legislative policies. Healthcare, school curricula and legislation must remain anchored to physical reality. Scientific research should focus upon better understanding the psychological underpinnings of this disorder, optimal family and individual therapies, as well as delineating the differences among children who resolve with watchful waiting versus those who resolve with therapy and those who persist despite therapy.
Nudging. Republicans believe in self-determination; Democrats more often favor government regulation and coercion. In general, Republicans and many Libertarians would say, “Just give me the facts, and I’ll decide.” Democrats want behaviors that scientists consider unhealthful to be banned, from smoking to diet sodas to gun ownership. Sometimes instead of outright banning, they will support “nudging” with psychological propaganda to change the behavior of others (not their own, of course). A case in point is a Medical Xpress item titled, “Freedom-based considerations for withdrawing, withholding options: The example of tobacco control and nudging policies.” In the article, a Princeton academic considers how to make citizens think they have freedom, when they are really being manipulated. Andreas Schmidt appears aware of the bad optics, but justifies it with a touch of elitism:
Some argue that nudging infringes upon people’s freedom and autonomy. Others say that nudging always happens, so why not nudge people toward better decisions. Of Schmidt’s considerations, only status freedom may offer an objection to nudging policies, but if nudging policies are transparent and democratic, this will mitigate the potential for status abuses.
Who decides what constitutes “transparent and democratic”? The nudgers obviously have a goal in mind, and a policy to implement it. To envision the probable outcome, all you need to do is ask what happens if the nudgee (the citizen) decides to go against the nudger (the government regulator). A perceptive commenter wrote this:
Tell me, how does government create a “nudging policy” without first taking money via force from citizens, to actually create and implement the policy? Isn’t taking people’s money from them via force (thru a majority vote of course) an infringement on their freedom to keep the fruits of their labor?
Endangered species. A common propaganda tactic is to demonize the opposition. National Geographic, in an unvarnished hit piece against Republicans, discussed “Why These Rare Species Are Targeted by the GOP.” The article is a clear attack on the Republican party platform. Reporter Brian Clark Howard portrays Republicans as mean-spirited people who don’t care about endangered species. “In the end, perhaps the GOP’s mention of these species in their platform has more to do with wider cultural wars than wildlife science,” he says, positioning Republicans once again as anti-science.
Big Science has lost its way. It is not the role of a scientist to engage in partisan politics. For whatever reason, the leaders in Big Science (journal editors, mainstream media heads, and lobbyists for scientific societies) have gone whole hog for the Democrat Party. Why? It’s a case of conflict of interest. They think that Democrats like Obama and Clinton funnel more more money to them. In this they are sadly mistaken, as the bitter fruits of socialism appear in Venezuela, leaving scientists struggling (Nature). Big Science’s best hope for a prosperous research environment would be to have a thriving economy—the result of free markets and the rule of law that protects private property (Prager University). Those are Republican values (Prager U). If they were really objective scientists, they would look at the pitifully slow economic recovery over the last 8 years under a Democrat administration, and turn right. They would consider whether the other party might offer true hope and change. A prosperous America would, once again, bring in higher tax revenues that would enable higher funding for science. A bankrupt country cannot afford such luxuries.
Exercises: Watch the Prager University videos on economics to the point where you can articulate the principles of free markets to others. Then watch D’Souza’s documentaries Obama’s America and Hillary’s America. Be part of a grass-roots effort to educate people out of their indoctrination. The aim of this exercise is to bring balance back into political discourse, because it is wildly imbalanced now, as shown by these examples (if you can find a clear pro-Republican article in Big Science or Big Media, please send it to us). Like Darwin said, “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” It’s OK to share disagreements on any of the issues above—but only after the deprogramming is complete.
Above all, let’s stop pretending that Big Science is objective when it comes to political, economic and worldview matters. Their hands are dirty in political advocacy, almost always for the Democrat, leftist, socialist, globalist, elitist side of any issue. Their writings have value when they are discussing observable, repeatable, testable facts about natural phenomena. Even then, you have to watch the Materials and Methods, and see if the conclusions logically follow from the data. You have to rinse off the Darwinist spin. Use our Baloney Detector and Darwin Dictionary for help when necessary. A scientist ceases to be a scientist when he leaves off the ideals of science, to understand the cause-and-effect structure of the world according to testable hypotheses. That takes rigor, integrity, and humility. “Vote for Clinton!” is not a scientifically rigorous statement.