Post-Election, “Nature” Publishes Yet Another Anti-Trump Screed

Sometimes the most intelligent people are the least smart. That sure seems true of the editors of Nature, once the universally respected British science journal.

As I have noted before, Nature is becoming almost as ideological as it is scientific. It endorsed Kamala Harris for president and then, just before the election, doubled down on excoriating Donald Trump for somehow being anti-science — when most of the issues discussed in the article were blatantly political.

Now that Trump is president-elect after an overwhelming electoral victory — and an apparent popular-vote victory — one would think that Nature’s editors would have the common sense to cease from excoriating him. But no. It just published another anti-Trump screed declaring that the world’s scientists are aghast that he won the election. In “We Need to be Ready for a New World,” Nature’s senior reporter, Jeff Tollefson, writes:

Scientists around the world expressed disappointment and alarm as Republican Donald Trump won the final votes needed to secure the US presidency in the early hours of 6 November. Owing to Trump’s anti-science rhetoric and actions during his last term in office, many are now bracing for four years of attacks on scientists inside and outside the government.

It was the Biden administration — not Trump’s — that exerted undue influence on proposed care guidelines for gender-dysphoric children — without any criticism appearing in the pages of Nature.

Tollefson quotes a prominent scientist’s alarmist statement:

“In my long life of 82 years … there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad,” says Fraser Stoddart, a Nobel laureate who left the United States last year and is now chair of chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. “I’ve witnessed something that I feel is extremely bad, not just for the United States, but for all of us in the world.”

Are you kidding me? Stoddart left free America for Hong Kong, which had its liberty crushed by the Chinese Communist Party before he moved there. He willingly works under a tyrannical government that is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, harvests the organs of Falun Gong members for the black market in transplants, deploys slave labor, has imposed a truly dictatorial social-credit system on the whole population, engages in mass intellectual-property theft internationally, and has commissars watching over the work of scientists. And Trump is the problem?

And note the blatant partisanship expressed in the story:

“We need to be ready for a new world,” says Grazyna Jasienska, a longevity researcher at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. “I am trying to be optimistic, but it is hard to find any positive aspects for global science and public health if Republicans take over.”

It’s not smart to make it seem as if the scientific sector is one-sidedly ideological:

Worries pouring in this morning align with those expressed by the majority of readers who responded last month to a survey conducted by Nature. Eighty-six per-cent of the more than 2,000 people who answered the poll said that they favoured Harris, owing to concerns including climate change, public health and the state of US democracy. Some even said they would consider changing where they live or study if Trump won.

Well, bye. But at least the survey wasn’t unanimously anti-Trump:

Not all researchers are against a Trump presidency, however. Of those who responded to Nature’s reader survey, 6% expressed a preference for Trump — usually citing concerns about security issues and the economy.

Ominously, the article contained hints of government scientists’ intention to try to undermine Trump policy:

“Starting now, we are going to need brave people, people willing to push back, protect the vulnerable, and do what’s right over what’s easy,” says one senior official with the US Environmental Protection Agency, who declined to be named because they were afraid of retribution under a new Trump administration. “We do have to remember what’s right. And what’s right is protecting public health and the environment.”

This stupidity brings to mind the utter foolishness of Laura Helmuth, Scientific American’s editor in chief, who posted profanity-laced tweets on Election Night bitterly attacking Gen-Z Trump voters. She called them “f***ing fascists” and expressed hatred for her former “bigoted” high school classmates who might be celebrating Trump’s victory. “F*** them to the moon and back.”

Alas, it is clear the editors of many science journals cannot control themselves. So it is up to the governing boards of these publications to clean house and restore objectivity and political neutrality to their publications. Otherwise, the increasing public distrust of scientific institutions — a distrust frequently decried by the science establishment — will only intensify.