Science Is Being Corrupted by Politics
The political divide in the culture has spilled over into science, ruining trust in research objectivity.
New York University just published results of a “study” [prepare to be hoodwinked] that alleges that there is no censorship of conservatives going on. All those conservatives complaining about being deplatformed by social media, having their Twitter accounts dropped and otherwise being victims of bias – well, they’re just making “false accusations,” say Paul M. Barrett and J. Grant Sims. It’s an “unfounded claim” that social media companies censor conservatives. Do you understand? It’s an unfounded claim. Repeat after me: it’s an unfounded claim, unfounded claim, unfounded claim….
It takes a little digging to realize that this “study” that pretends to look like an objective, academic research conclusion is anything but. NYU is a hotbed of leftist, anti-conservative views to begin with. WND says, moreover, that the “study” was funded by a Biden donor.
A study from New York University released on Monday that dismisses conservative allegations of Big Tech bias and calls for President Joe Biden to establish a Digital Regulatory Agency was funded by Craig Newmark, a billionaire tech titan who donated $100,000 to Biden’s campaign victory fund.
The study, entitled “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives,” also defends decisions by Facebook and Twitter to both ban President Donald Trump from their platforms last month, and to limit circulation of a story from The New York Post weeks before the election about emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The study authors, who are basically shills for Newmark, concluded that it was “reasonable” for the tech giants to engage in their unilateral actions canceling accounts they didn’t like. Such thinking corrupts any rational definition of “reasonable.” It must have been reasonable for Lenin and Stalin to purge their enemies, too.
Tucker Carlson mocked this “study” with satire on Fox News on 2 Feb 2021. He quoted from the authors who admitted that they had no evidence on which to base their conclusions, because “Twitter does not release sufficient data.” So much for science. As for those who have experienced real censorship, Barrett and Sims chalked those cases up to “mistakes.” And when Twitter shut down the New York Post‘s account for publishing a story unflattering to the Bidens before the election—a clear case of censorship—the authors called that action “reasonable.” Since when can researchers define what is reasonable? They need to make their case with evidence and let the readers decide if it is reasonable.
Carlson continued by exposing that the study was paid for by Big Tech, specifically by Biden campaign billionnaire Craig Newmark, with additional funding by George Soros. “In 2021,” he says, “billionaires fund their own studies; as a result, they get the conclusions they had paid for, and the rest of us get to obey those conclusions. That’s called science, ladies and gentlemen.”
Politically Molded Biology
In the biological study of multicellular life, perhaps the most telling aspect of an organism’s nature is its sex. Photos and diagrams of birds, fish, and reptiles often contain the familiar male or female symbol as part of the identification. Even in Darwin’s day, the idea of gender multiplicity and fluidity would have seemed so foreign as to elicit expressions of bewilderment. This is the way it has been for thousands of years. Individuals have had occasional instances of psychological confusion about their identity, but the reality of biological sex was unquestioned. The tiny percentage of cases of people born with ambiguous genitalia or ambiguous chromosomes (e.g., XXY) were never treated as evolutionary leaps toward the emergence of new sexes, but just as medical abnormalities (mutations) requiring intervention to steer the child and parents toward an acceptable choice between male and female. Those with conflicts between their outward sexual organs and their inward feelings might need compassionate counseling to learn to accept reality, but were never celebrated as whole new sexual identities – that is, until recently.
Cultural Marxists succeeded in carving out a new victim class between oppressors and oppressed: the LGBTQ+ movement. Liberal academia jumped right in, making it politically incorrect to say anything against it, other than to affirm the new alphabet soup of gender identities to show one is a good citizen of the Regime. If anyone thought that science might step in to bring some objectivity to the current confusion, they were due for disappointment. Secular scientific institutions today celebrate the confusion, and step on themselves to be first in gender-affirming every identity choice anyone makes. In fact, it can be a threat to one’s job to not conform. Some states have banned “conversion therapy” aimed at helping the confused learn to be happy with their biological sex. Even if a boy or girl or teen wants to get help to work through the emotional issues which often lead to confusion and depression, it can be against the law, with severe consequences like loss of a license, for a psychologist or church counselor to step up and offer help. Churches in particular may face increasing pressure to keep quiet about this subject, even those strongly affirming traditional family values. It may be a thought crime in 2021 to affirm Biblical authority that God created human beings male and female.
Providing inclusive care for LGBTQ2SPIA+ cancer patients (Medical Xpress). What jumps out of this article, featuring four young female-looking researchers from the University of Alberta (whom we dare not call women or girls), is the doubling of the alphabet-soup label that transgenders are now using. Don’t even ask what the additional letters mean; it doesn’t matter. These transgender activists have no reason to stop expanding the unwieldy acronym until every letter of the alphabet stands for another new gender identity. Even that wouldn’t stop them: they could continue on with Greek letters, bold, italic and various symbols in order to be “inclusive” of every “oppressed” person in the new victim class. Once you qualify as oppressed, then you can take out vengeance on the oppressors, and demand special treatment, reparations, or a new pride parade. It’s all a strategy for silencing anyone who is not “inclusive” (a curious word that means the opposite in practice of what it alleges to mean—see “Comments on Tolerance” under “Self-Referential Fallacy” in the Baloney Detector).
The four smiling bigots in the article have no love for objective science. They just want to show how much they care for the gender-confused who face cancer treatment.
“I can’t really think of ‘how’ I am actively creating a safe environment for disclosing their sexual orientation, nor do I know how to properly create that environment….I can definitely say that I am non-judgmental of their life choices if it comes up in conversation, etc., but I really don’t know what more I should be doing, admittedly. Further training or information on how to better create a safe environment for patients would be beneficial.”
Moral posturing drips from this short article, as seen with the pride these four female-whatevers show off the longer acronym repeatedly. Would they settle for a hospital having a simple rule of treating every individual with compassion? No; the gender Marxists require a revolution. The identity of the victim must be affirmed. No matter the category, it’s the oppressors who must confess, be re-educated, and bend. So now, when a biological female wants to be treated for prostate cancer, or a biological male seeks treatment for uterine cancer, pray for the surgeon who says the wrong thing. He/she/it might lose its medical license.
Rand Paul Denounces Biden Transgender Sports Policy (Breitbart News). The activities of transgender activists are not just laughing matters. They affect real lives. By denying that women exist, the transgenderists encourage sexually confused people to claim that they are whatever they feel themselves to be, and that society owes them affirmation. In practice this means that transgender women (biological males) should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Listen to Senator Rand Paul try to get a straight answer from Democrat Senator Miguel Cardona whether he thinks it is fair to let boys compete in girls’ track meets. This is not a hypothetical situation. In “progressive” schools and colleges around the country, girls are having to compete with biological males who “identify” as women even though they have greater height, strength and muscle mass than girls. Typically, the boys walk away with all the medals and deprive the finest female athletes in their sports from getting scholarships. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is trying to sue a school that deprived their champion female athlete from progressing toward a career in sports because the boys took all the awards. Is that fair? One does not honor women by pretending they don’t exist. What kind of “science” could endorse such an idea? Rand Paul calls it “bizarre” to push for boys competing as girls. He says people listen to such policies from the Left and think, “What planet are you from?”
As these examples from the media show, concerned citizens must be wary of anyone who claims to “follow the science.”
Can anyone remember a time of worse confusion about reality than we are seeing right now? Objectivity is gone. Truth is gone. Science is now a tool of politics, and it’s becoming dangerously hard to tell what “studies” coming out of academia contain anything reliable. Why is this happening? At root, it is a denial of God. Instead of acknowledging God as Creator and the only One able to tell us who we are, why we are here, and what we should be doing, society has cast off that foundation. Like in the time of the judges, everyone does what is right in their own eyes. With the loss of Truth has come the grasp for power. It’s very Darwinian, you see; might makes right, survival of the fittest, and groupthink are the new values. Dark times may be ahead for those who refuse to bow the knee to the new world order.
Incidentally, did you know that Karl Marx was a filthy, womanizing scoundrel who never held a job (he was supported by Engels) and who despised common workers? Listen to this book review of Intellectuals by Paul Johnson, discussed by Michael Knowles and Allen Estrin at Prager U.