Category: wokeness

A critique of Scientific American

May 8, 2024 • 10:00 am

If you’ve read this site for a while, you’ll know that I’ve documented the decline and fall of the magazine Scientific American (see all my posts here). Under the editorship of Laura Helmuth, the magazine has become increasingly woke. And by “woke”, I mean “neglecting science in favor of pushing a progressive ideology.”  One of the classic examples of this decline is a hit job that the magazine published on E. O. Wilson, accusing him of racism—along with other scientists like Charles Darwin and yes—wait for it—Gregor Mendel. A quote:

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Darwin, of course was an abolitionist, though he did share the view of his time that white people were in general superior. But the article doesn’t mention that, for it violates the dprogressive tendency to indict people of the past for not conforming to today’s beliefs. And if Gregor Mendel ever wrote a racist word, I don’t know about it!

The author, Monica McLemore, also took it upon herself to “problematize” the normal distribution of statistics. Check out the first two sentences, which are totally bogus:

First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against. The fact that we don’t adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, particularly in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical underpinnings of a superior subject and an inferior one.

Oy! Several of us, all scientists, sent a defense of Wilson to the magazine as a response to McLemore’s piece, but our defense was summarily rejected.  There’s no “search for truth” in this magazine if your views contravene progressive “presentism”.

And here’s a list of ten articles pushing progressive ideology published within the single year of 2021 (if the links to the stories aren’t visible in the posts, click on the icon anyway). The first one is a gem:

1.) Bizarre acronym pecksniffery in Scientific American.Title: “Why the term ‘JEDI’ is problematic for describing programs that promote justice, diversity, equity, and Inclusion.”

2.) More bias in Scientific American, this time in a “news” article. Title: “New math research group reflects a schism in the field.”

3.) Scientific American again posting non-scientific political editorials.Title: “The anti-critical race theory movement will profoundly effect public education.“

4.) Scientific American (and math) go full woke.  Title: “Modern mathematics confronts its white, patriarchal past.”

5.) Scientific American: Denying evolution is white supremacy. Title: “Denial of evolution is a form of white supremacy.”

6.) Scientific American publishes misleading and distorted op-ed lauding Palestine and demonizing Israel, accompanied by a pro-Palestinian petition. Title: “Health care workers call for support of Palestinians.” (The title is still up but see #7 below)

7.) Scientific American withdraws anti-Semitic op-ed. Title of original article is above, but now a withdrawal appears (they vanished the text): “Editor’s Note: This article fell outside the scope of Scientific American and has been removed.”   Now, apparently, nothing falls outside the scope of the magazine!

8.) Scientific American: Religious or “spiritual” treatment of mental illness produces better outcomes. Title: “Psychiatry needs to get right with God.”

9.)  Scientific American: Transgender girls belong on girl’s sports teams. Title:  “Trans girls belong on girls’ sports teams.”

and one more for an even ten, as I’m not going to spend another minute doing this:

10.) Former Scientific American editor, writing in the magazine, suggests that science may find evidence for God using telescopes and other instruments. Title: “Can science rule out God?“

But I digress. The topic here is a long article published in the City Journal by James Meigs, documenting the downfall of the magazine as one example of a general degeneration of science journalism. Click to read:

Meigs begins with how Michael Shermer wrote a monthly “Skeptic” column in Sci Am for seventeen years, but they gave him his pink slip after he started criticizing the claim that abused children tend to grow up to become abusers themselves. Shermer then argued, unforgivably, that there’s been progress in racial relations, and in eliminating pollution and poverty, reprising the theme of several recent books by Steven Pinker. Apparently progressives frown on the idea that there’s been progress in anything.

Shermer tells his story in a Skeptic column called “Scientific American goes woke.” As he said,

My revised December column, titled “Kids These Days,” focused on the growing concern over Gen Z kids having significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety, which Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt attribute to “coddling” by helicopter parenting and the larger culture of safetyism.

Shortly after the December 2018 column I was given my walking papers, but was allowed one more farewell column in January, 2019. In it I noted that in accordance with (Herb) Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever won’t”—closed out my streak at 214 consecutive essays, my dream deferred to another day, which has now come in accordance to Davies’ Corollary to Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”

Back to Meigs, who notes the decline of science journalism and its infusion with au courant ideology:

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

Meigs indicts intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, queer studies, and postmodern notions of truth as factors in this decline.  Here are a few areas where Meigs argues that Scientific American failed after Laura Helmuth, who had sterling credentials, became editor of Sci Am in April, 2020.

Covid

 . . .  those difficult times represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an ambitious science editor. Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

The magazine apparently had no patience with the “lab leak” theory for the origin of the virus:

During the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream media outlets barely mentioned the lab-leak debate. And when they did, they generally savaged both the idea and anyone who took it seriously. In March 2021, long after credible evidence emerged hinting at a laboratory origin for the virus, Scientific American published an article, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” The piece compared the theory to the KGB’s disinformation campaign about the origin of HIV/AIDS and blamed lab-leak advocates for creating a poisonous climate around the issue: “The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. It has also led to a vilification of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research (such as ‘gain of function’ research).”

The author faults Fauci for repressing information supporting this theory, but my pay grade isn’t high enough to judge whether that’s true.

Social Justice (the “JEDI” article is a gem, and note my self-aggrandizement)

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

The magazine also broke with tradition and endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020 (Nature, Science, and New Scientist did the same). Unless you can make a solid argument that one candidate will damage science more than another, this kind of advocacy violates the kind of “institutional neutrality” that should pervade science journals.

Gender issues  Meigs criticizes the magazine for being gung-ho for “affirmative therapy”:

In such an overheated environment, it would be helpful to have a journalistic outlet advocating a sober, evidence-based approach. In an earlier era, Scientific American might have been that voice. Unfortunately, SciAm today downplays messy debates about gender therapies, while offering sunny platitudes about the “safety and efficacy” of hormone treatments for prepubescent patients. For example, in a 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?,” the magazine repeats the unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children. “These medications are well studied and have been used safely since the late 1980s to pause puberty in adolescents with gender dysphoria,” SciAm states.

The independent journalist Jesse Singal, a longtime critic of slipshod science reporting, demolishes these misleading claims in a Substack post. In fact, the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria is a new and barely researched phenomenon, he notes: “[W]e have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time to see how they have fared.” Singal finds it especially alarming to see a leading science magazine obscure the uncertainty surrounding these treatments. “I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret,” he writes.

The truth will out, but not due to Scientific American!

It’s not just popular magazines about science that have been ideologically colonized, either. Technical cience and medical journals are going the same route; these include Science, Nature, Lancet, JAMA, New Scientist, and PNAS. The same is happening with scientific societies, which increasingly are becoming enclaves of progressive ideology, with keynote speeches, once devoted to science, now devoted to ideology.  This is what Luana Maroja and I meant when we concluded our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology with these words:

Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

When I wrote that last sentence, I thought it might be a wee bit hyperbolic, but now I’m not so sure. When scientists are forced to see nature through the lenses of progressive ideology, indicting Mendel for racism and renaming every animal whose popular name came from a person’s name, it doesn’t fool the public. They know that politics are warping science. The results are that the public loses trust in science—a trust based on the increasingly false assumption that scientists are objective researchers whose job is simply to figure out how nature works, not ideologues bent on twisting science to fit a progressive ideology. As Meigs notes:

 When scientists claim to represent a consensus about ideas that remain in dispute—or avoid certain topics entirely—those decisions filter down through the journalistic food chain. Findings that support the social-justice worldview get amplified in the media, while disapproved topics are excoriated as disinformation. Not only do scientists lose the opportunity to form a clearer picture of the world; the public does, too. At the same time, the public notices when claims made by health officials and other experts prove to be based more on politics than on science. A new Pew Research poll finds that the percentage of Americans who say that they have a “great deal” of trust in scientists has fallen from 39 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today.

That’s a drop in trust of over 40% in just four years.  The way to regain that trust, if it’s even possible now, is to stick to the truth, leaving out your politics.  Unfortunately, Scientific American and many other journals and magazines can’t refrain from injecting ideology into science.

h/t: Simon

The Lancet extols Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

April 25, 2024 • 11:15 am

The British medical journal The Lancet has become infamous for being woke (its editor is beyond redemption), and is most infamous for the cover below.  As I once said, its wokeness makes it the British version of Scientific American, though it deals with original research and is entirely (or supposed to be entirely) medical in nature.

The journal has just become a bit more infamous by publishing a glowing paean to “Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges” (is “knowledge” suppose to be plural here?), seemingly making the knowledge of indigenous people coequal to the knowledge produced by modern science. In other words, it’s adopting what seems to be the national policy of science education in New Zealand.

Click to read; it’s free (the pdf is here). The authors are from Uganda, Canada, Tanzania, New Zealand (of course), the U.S., and Canada:

The main message, besides the boilerplate about oppression, is that indigenous people have knowledge that is essential in helping us solve not only the problem of global warming, but also “health discourse.”

Now you know that’s not really true. While indigenous people may have some observations bearing on the effects of both human health and especially global warming, it’s up to both national politics and international science to address global warming. (I don’t have much confidence they’ll remedy the problem.) And it’s up to modern medicine to deal with health issues. We’re way beyond the days of herbal cures and chanting. To say that indigenous “knowledges” is not only important, but “the optimal way forward” (see below) is to indulge in hyperbolic and performative rhetoric.

But let me give a few quotes.

Indigenous Dene Elder Francois Paulette from northern Canada talked about climate change at the 2015 Parliament of the World Regions and warned “Your way of life is killing my way of life.”
He ended his speech with the words: “Rise! It’s time to stand up for our future.”More than 8 years after this speech, an estimated 68% of the Northwest Territories, Canada, which includes the Dene Peoples territory, was evacuated due to 238 wildfires. Communities lost their homes and hunting and food-foraging areas and were exposed to poor air quality for months on end. Elder Francois’ words still ring true today for many Indigenous Peoples around the globe. We are still far away from the world understanding the impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities and the need to move towards efficient and comprehensive action for planetary health.

 

Indigenous Peoples have experienced historical and ongoing colonialism, ecocide, epistemicide, racism, and severe marginalisation and are disproportionately affected by poverty and reduced life expectancy.Yet despite these challenges they continue to protect and steward about 80% of all the remaining biodiversity on Earth. For Indigenous Peoples, every day is Earth Day, with the basis of their lives underpinned by a healthy relationship with the planet and extensive Indigenous Traditional Knowledges (ITK) developed over millennia. However, Indigenous leadership within planetary health practice to shape research, policy, and practice is still challenged by a multitude of factors.

It’s simply not true that indigenous people steward 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. First of all, the reference seems to be talking only about Australia. Second, the reference appears to show that 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity occurs in areas occupied by indigenous people. There’s no evidence I can find that the locals are “stewarding” that biodiversity beyond the statement, “This highlights how indigenous communities have mastered how to live alongside nature in a way that other communities have not.” It seems that living in areas with biodiversity is equivalent to “stewarding” that biodiversity. But we know that’s not true. In many cases indigenous people have destroyed biodiversity, like the extensive burning of natural forest by the Māori or the burning of prairie by Native Americans not to preserve it, but to get food, as well as their mass slaughter of bison by driving them o0ver the cliffs. That killed far more animals than they can use. What kind of “stewarding” is that?

ITK is also extolled for its “practical knowledge”; and indeed, that’s where it excels: understanding the place and rhythm of where food grows, how to catch that food, how to make stuff that one needs to live (knives, baskets, and so on). But ITK is not equivalent to modern science in many ways that are important: ITK is not generally driven by hypothesis testing, double-blind congrolled experiments, statistics, an atmosphere of doubt, and so on. While ITK is a bag of practical observations, modern science is a bag of tools for finding out stuff.

The article also has the obligatory denigration of “western” science, too, and a denial that indigenous “ways of knowing,” contain more than empirical fact. But in fact ITK, like New Zealand’s Mātauranga Māori, comprises far more than practical knowledge, including religion, mythology, traditional stories, superstition, morality, and guidlines for living. My bolding below:

ITK is increasingly informing climate and biodiversity solutions.  Although this is positive for Indigenous recognition, Indigenous Peoples who hold this knowledge are not usually directly involved in leading such efforts due to structural marginalisation. Implementation movements need to ensure that Indigenous Peoples and their rights are platformed first and foremost within any discussion around ITK. Additionally, ITK is often deemed myth or legend, or faces erasure within western-based institutions, despite it being replete with practical understandings of ecology, meteorology, and the relationship to the environmental rhythms gained over generations of observation and experimentation. Scientific disciplines, including within the medical and health sciences fields, therefore continue to largely marginalise ITK and there are expectations that it should conform to a western standard of evidence as the sole grading rubric of validity—a demonstration of the continuing effects of colonisation.

Well, yes, we need to bring as many voices as possible within science, but by “voices,” I don’t mean “ethnic groups”. I mean we should cast the net as wide as possible looking for scientific talent, and if we find a bit of practical indigenous knowledge to help move science forward, well, so much the better. But in the end, the statement in bold gives away the authors’ desire to “decolonize” modern science: “western standards of evidence” are apparently not the only standards of evidence for judging knowledge. But if they aren’t, what other standards should we use?  Tradition, superstition, and so on? Modern science is simply a toolkit of methods used to ascertain what is true. And there are no other ways to find out what’s “valid” beyond that. (I’m using “science” as “science construed broadly” here, as, for example, what a mechanic does to find out where the problem is in a car.) If the authors think there are ways of knowing beyond this, let them tell us. As it is, you won’t find a single example in this article besides the unsubstantiated claim that indigenous people “steward” 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

It’s hard for me to go on, as this article suffers from the diagnostic problem of all such sacralizations of indigenous knowledge: a lack of examples of how indigenous knowledge has contributed to modern knowledge. A few anecdotes will not suffice. After all, the National Science Foundation has just allocated $29 million to establish a “Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS)”, and there had better be substantial payoff to justify that kind of dosh.

The article goes on, but the ideas are familiar: because indigenous people were oppressed and treated badly (often true!), their “knowledges” should be seen as almost sacred, but certainly very valuable, and coequal to “western” science. But if you look at the advances that modern science has made in just 150 years in physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, none of them would even be possible with indigenous knowledge. Yet that knowledge is to be considered highly important, and, without it, say the authors, science is blinkered:

Without meaningful engagement and data representation, Indigenous initiatives are sidelined or neglected. Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges should not just be “considered” within climate change and health discourse and practice, which is typically the case now, but platformed as the optimal way forward.

Platformed as the optimal way forward? What does that mean? Why can’t ITK just be “considered”?  Finally, we hear once again the notion that ITK is one of two essential eyes in science’s way of finding knowledge (I believe this metaphor comes from Canada’s First People):

 Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers need “to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together” for the survival of our planet. We need to understand that Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au (I am the river, and the river is me).

You see how both eyes are considered necessary and coequal to move science forward? I don’t think that’s the case.  Indigenous ways of knowing can, as I’ve said, add practical knowledge to what modern science has found, but it’s by no means a coequal “eye.” And I don’t understand why I have to adopt the mantra that the river is me to study hydrology. After all, I never learned much about genetics from thinking “I am the fruit fly, and the fruit fly is me.”

I’ll regard indigenous knowledge as more important when its promoters start giving us examples—real examples, not anecdotes about catching eels—of how it has made, or can make, important contributions to empirical knowledge.  We shall see what the NSF’s $29 million produces.

Quote of the week: Andrew Sullivan on wokeness vs. liberalism

April 20, 2024 • 12:15 pm

From Andrew Sullivan’s new Weekly Dish piece, “Katherine Maher is not a liberal“, criticizing the new CEO of National Public Radio:

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

UCLA goes bonkers, hires unhinged “activist in residence” to give a lecture mandatory for all entering med-school students, who are forced to pray for “mama Earth” and chant pro-Palestinian slogans

April 11, 2024 • 9:30 am

The last time I posted something about an article by Georgetown University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, I believe someone beefed because Turley was a conservative, implying that his articles couldn’t be trusted. Well, I deplore the attitude that you can judge the veracity of claims using the ideology, race, or gender of someone who reports them: all you have to do is check the facts!  And it turns out that the startling and disturbing facts adduced in this new piece by Turley on his website check out (remember, most articles give links).

And yes, it’s true that UCLA has an “Activist-in-Residence” program, blending ideology with scholarship, and that first year medical students at UCLA were forced to listen to a lecture given by an apparently bonkers pro-Palestinian woman described as a “formerly incarcerated and unhoused poverty scholar” who made the students chant for Palestine as well as to pray to “mama Earth.”

Read and weep by clicking the headline:

This is unbelievable, except, as far as I can determine, it checks out. Excerpts from Turley are indented:

There has been much discussion about the controversial mandatory lecture for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles from a pro-Palestinian speaker accused of anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. However, there is less attention to the fact that Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia was appearing because she is one of UCLA’s paid Activists-in-Residence.

Gray-Garica is described by UCLA as “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”

. . . In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.”

It was part of what was billed as a talk on “Housing (In)justice in LA: Addressing Unhousing and Practicing Solidarity.”

A complaint filed after the lecture [JAC: see below] alleges that students were expected to chant “Free, free Palestine” and when one student refused to stand during one prayer, an unidentified UCLA faculty member asked for the pupil’s name. The complaint alleges that students were concerned that they would face repercussions if they did not chant and pray on command.

In the lecture, posted online, Gray-Garcia keeps her face covered with a keffiyeh while veering off into a diatribe over the Gaza Strip.  She also attacked the concept and defense of private property as “crapitalist lies” that kill “black, brown and houseless people.”

First, let’s check out Tiny Gray-Garcia. You can see her views on her public Facebook page, with this header:

A few pictures, with and without keffiyeh or face covering.  If you browse, you’ll find that it’s all-Palestine all the time

And Mama Earth, too! This looks like the garb she lectured in, as you can see in the short clip below:

But she isn’t always covered; she appears to be the woman in the middle (from her Facebook page):

Here she is on the latest Activist-in-Residence page, face not visible.  I wonder if there were ever any conservative or even centrist “activists” included in this program.

Here’s the page showing UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence program,  As they say, the purpose of that program is to disrupt the university and effect Social Justice:

It is our objective to “turn the university inside out” and invite artists, community organizers, and movement leaders to undertake power-shifting scholarship and pedagogy focused on social change. This program provides opportunities for activists to engage with the UCLA community to develop and strengthen their capabilities, work, and commitment towards social, racial, spatial, and gender justice.

This is explicitly ideological and would certainly not be permitted at the University of Chicago. Yet UCLA is a public university, and I wonder if the program is being funded by the taxpayers of California.

Now some of the projects sound like really good ones, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that social-justice change, all in a “progressive” direction, is part of the mission of a university, especially a public one. Below is UCLA’s official profile of Tiny as a “Poverty Skola” on the page (click to enlarge), further described as a “formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar”. (“Formerly unhoused” is progressive Newspeak for “was once homeless”, and of course you know what “incarcerated” means. Her crime is not given, though, in the ten-minute video below; she says it was a “poverty crime”.)

Gray-Garcia’s UCLA lecture online at the link is an excerpt only only 100 seconds long, not the two full hours that Turley implies, but in this Tik Tok clip you can see a weirdly garbed Gray-Garcia walking around haranguing the students with wacko ideology:

@povertyskola

Excerpt of “The myth of Clean and the unhoused body on stolen land -presented by povertyskolaz at #Poormagazine #AetnaStreet #KripHopNation at #uclamedschool #Povertyscholarship #Homefulness #Prop1 #4118 @The Black Kripple @Poor People’s Army @Delphine Brody

♬ original sound – PovertySkola

Here’s Tiny giving a ten-minute talk online, coming off as an activist but also unhinged. What I wonder is what this person has to contribute to the education of medical students.   It’s hard to see why on earth an anti-Semitic Marxist should be selected to give a lecture that must be heard by first-year medical students. Is this the best that UCLA can do? But of course her presentation simply reflects the indoctrination that UCLA’s activists, and at the medical school, want to give their students.  There is, of course, no counterspeech, only that one student who refused to pray to “mama Earth”.

More from Turley:

Gray-Garcia was undeterred by the complaint or the criticism, posting on X the next day: “As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine, and all of Mama Earth in prayer and love, we need to make connections.”

Here’s the tweet. Gray-Garcia repeatedly analogizes, throughout her discourse, gentrified American areas with Israeli “colonialism”. She also accuses Israel of “apartheid.”

More from Turley:

There have been ample objections to this indoctrination session at UCLA, but the school has been criticized for years for its viewpoint intolerance and orthodoxy.

However, what is most disturbing is the decision of the university that higher education should have paid “activists-in-residence.”  At a school notorious for excluding conservative and libertarian voices, it is doubtful that it would embrace a pro-life or anti-transgender activist in residence. Instead, the faculty can enlist the support of activists to push an ideological agenda in mandatory sessions like this one.

UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy has gushed with praise for Gray-Garcia’s “rousing remarks presented in the form of spoken word poetry.”

UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy, who created the residency program, heralded how the activists-in-residence is part of “our effort to turn the university inside out.” Roy added that “at the Institute, we organize knowledge within, against and beyond the university. The Activist-in-Residence program brings to the university the movement scholars and public intellectuals who are teachers and guides for this praxis.”

The faculty, including Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris who is the Interim Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, obviously support this view of higher education.

The question is why taxpayers and donors should support such school-sponsored activism. I previously wrote about the “radical chic” of academia as well as the new focus on “activism” as a field of study.

In fact, Turley says he encourages his students to be activists. But we shouldn’t tell them HOW to be activists, which is exactly what UCLA Medical School is doing by giving Tiny, with known views, a platform. Will they give someone like Turley, or even a centrist, a plaform for a mandatory med-school lecture? Given the way med schools are going, I wouldn’t count on it!

Many of us encourage political activism and engagement of our students. They need to bring their passion and voices to the debates today over issues ranging from abortion to the environment to wars.

We have long benefited from intellectual activists in our country, but they were intellectuals first and activists second. They were thought-leaders who used classic education to advance societal change.

Gray-Garcia embodies how academics are destroying the very intellectual foundation for higher education. Incorporating such “activists-in-residence” are extremely popular moves for faculty at schools like UCLA. However, they are hijacking higher education for their own political and professional purposes. The problem is that few have the courage to oppose such programs out of fear that they will be the next to be targeted in a cancel campaign or university investigation. Most remain in cringing silence as bizarre scenes like the one at UCLA play out on campus.

The one UCLA student who refused to pray on command was a courageous exception. However, we should all pray for the future of American higher education if Gray-Garcia is the measure of American intellectual thought.

You can find the complaint about Tiny’s lecture by UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group here. The closing statement from that letter:

The Free Press reveals the inner workings and biases of NPR

April 10, 2024 • 11:15 am

If you’ve listened to National Public Radio (NPR) in the past few years, what you’ve heard is basically a progressive, left-wing radio station, not a station that represents American diveristy of opinions and viewpoints.  Several of my friends have canceled their subscriptions, even though they’re Democrats and consider themselves on the Left.

But NPR is also publicly funded to some extent. Although it claims that it gets less than 1% of its funding from the government (i.e., from taxpayers like you and me), The Hill notes that “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”

Regardless, NPR is suppose to be a radio station that all Americans can listen to with profit, not a megaphone for progressive Leftism. Yet, according to this new article in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, the senior editor of NPR’s business desk (and still with the station!), NPR has not only tilted increasingly leftward, with a changing demographic, but has become more “white” as elitist listeners tune in while blacks (and conservatives) don’t listen much. Further, it has bought into stories that were later found dubious or even debunked, yet has never corrected itself. Right now subscriptions are falling, the local branches are laying off workers, and NPR’s future seems uncertain.

Click to read: I’ll summarize it briefly and give a few quotes. Note at the bottom that NPR has officially responded, and I’m unsure whether Berliner has a future at the institution.

First, the changing demographic of listeners:

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

Berliner then goes into three stories in which NPR took positions that ultimately seemed dubious or even indefensible; but in no case did it ever correct itself (three points below are my take):

1.) NPR glommed onto the idea that Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. No evidence supporting that came out, and NPR quietly dropped the story without any corrections.

2.) NPR poo-pooed the “Hunter Biden laptop story,” barely covering it at all because it didn’t believe the notion that Hunter Biden would use his dad’s name to advance himself. It turned out that, of course, he did. NPR never corrected itself.

3.) NPR bought big-time into the “wild virus wet-market” theory for the origin of COVID, dismissing the idea that the virus came from a leak in a lab in Wuhan, China. As time progressed, the lab-leak theory became more credible, and now, though we still don’t know for sure, the lab-leak seems more credible than the wet market. NPR, however, utterly rejected the lab-leak theory and hasn’t corrected its earlier insistence.

According to Berliner, after the death of George Floyd the station adopted a form of Critical Race Theory, even accusing itself of complicity in racism. Of course if any station is lily-white, it would be this station with its elitist and progressive listeners carrying NPR tote bags and driving Volvos.  But it’s startling how quickly the issue of race came to dominate every aspect of NPR:

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

And I read this next bit with utter dismay.  Along with the absence of viewpoint diversity in its programs, something that the station simply ignores when it comes up, they’ve bought into gender activism to the point where they can’t use the term “biological sex”!  Oy!  And of course in the Hamas/Israel war, the station is tilting towards Palestine, because that’s what progressives want to hear: Israel is the white colonialist oppressor. I myself have noticed this even on my short drives around Chicago. Bolding below is mine:

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

The inevitable result is that people are tuning out and listening instead to the many podcasts on tap:

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Berliner offers a solution, which is to return to “traditional” journalism, but in the engaging way it used to. They need to broadcast more diverse viewpoints, perhaps even debates. Since NPR has a new CEO,  businesswoman Katherine Maher, only 40, it might change course. I can’t tell enough about her to guess if she’ll change the direction of NPR’s broadcasting.

You may well ask yourself, as I did, “Why on earth does Berliner stay at such a dysfunctional station?”  Well, maybe he’s hoping that Maher will effect a big change. But judging from his own narrative, buttressed with emails, names, and evidence, his tenure at NPR now seems to be one big tsuris.  And he doesn’t explain why, given this large kvetch, he’s still with the organization.

Sadly, some liberals are dismissing this piece; after all, it’s in the “conservative” Free Press.  As one reader wrote me:

A response to it from a friend, a fellow academic:
“This guy sounds like a disgruntled MAGA Republican boohoo.”
Liberalism is doomed!

*********

Now NPR has pushed back, and it’s not much of a response:

NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner’s assessment.

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”

She added, “None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole.”

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network’s chief content officer, would have no further comment.

But there are also heated denials from NPR employees rejecting Berliner’s claims. Read the piece to see them. Still, the best way to judge whether NPR is doing what it should do is simply to listen. And, thank Ceiling Cat, you no longer have to listen to the uber-woke and deeply spiritual Krista Tippett, who was let go. As I always said about her, she was so moved by her own profundity that she often came close to tears. Just sayin’.

The prescience of Titania McGrath

April 1, 2024 • 12:45 pm

Comedian Andrew Doyle was of course the creator of Titania McGrath, the entitled Wokestress whom many people took seriously. Yet she was amazingly prescient, with many of her spoofs of the woke eventually becoming true, with life imitating art. Click on the video below, and enlarge it, to see eight minutes of Titania’s prescience.

I won’t be able to post much (except for a huge post tomorrow a.m.) until Thursday, but this should fill some of that lacuna. Enjoy.

The National Academies tell editors, authors, and reviewers not to be be bullies or harassers

March 8, 2024 • 12:15 pm

My colleague the troublemaker Anna Krylov sent me this announcement from the prestigious National Academies of Sciences (NAS). I quote her with permission: “I read the policy and it is super annoying — patronizing and overreaching.”

This is a new policy for those engaged in NAS activities. There is to be no bullying, harassment, or discrimination among editors, authors, and reviewers. Not threats or intimidation, either, or “coercion to dominate others,” whatever that means. And if you commit these behaviors at meetings, workshops, conferences, or social functions that involve the National Academies in any way, you can get reported (a helpful link is given).

Now the behaviors singled out are indeed uncivilized behaviors that people should obey, and some are already illegal. However, to spell them out under threat of punishment is something you do to a two-year-old, not a grown-up scientist. It is indeed patronizing and offensive. Also, “aggressive behavior” or “coercion to dominate others” are slippery terms, and could be taken to mean being “domineering”—a regular feature of any group of scientists.

At any rate, it looks as though the latest trend in science is to not only specify minutely how they must and must not behave, but also threaten them if they don’t behave that way.

I wonder why this is happening now? I would guess that one reason might be legal liability, but these behaviors are already verboten in most venues, and there are already ways to prevent them.  Your guess is as good as mine.

From ideologues: Why genetics education must be sociopolitical

February 27, 2024 • 9:30 am

The latest issue of Science contains three ideological articles on how teaching of science must be reformed to be more inclusive and antiracist. Most of the authors of all three pieces are affiliated with departments or institutes of science education, and this may explain the mission-oriented tone of the pieces. I’ll discuss one of them today and another one soon.

This article argues that genetics education remains systemically racist, and must be attacked, dismantled, and made explicitly antiracist.  In fact, the article could have been written by an Ibram Kendi—if he knew anything about genetics.  As usual with such pieces, the problems it raises occurred largely in the past and are not currently “systemic” in genetics education. The article gives no evidence that today’s genetics classes are rife with racism, white supremacy, advocacy of eugenics, and other bad behaviors that create divisions between people. On the other hand, the article nevertheless wants to emphasize divisions between people—most notably “races:—as they see these divisions, conceived as “socially constructed”, as groups having differential power that must be recognized and effaced.

Besides being divisive, my main objection to the piece is that it assumes genetics is taught today as it was seventy years ago, which it isn’t, and, most of all, it tries to turn a science class into a class in ideology: a course in “dismantling” modern genetics to eliminate its white supremacy and then re-infusing it with “antiracist” values.  Having taught genetics and sat in on other genetics classes, the authors are dealing with a non-problem, and their solutions will only make genetics education worse: turning out a generation of ideologues who know less about genetics than the previous generation.

Click on the title to read, and you can find the pdf here. Excerpts from the piece are indented

First, the problem, stated in postmodern terms. Note the jargon:

The methods of conducting genetics research and its outcomes are steeped in, and influenced by, power and privilege dynamics in broader society. The kinds of questions asked, biological differences sought, and how populations are defined and examined are all informed by the respective dominant culture (often Eurocentric, white, economically privileged, masculine, and heteronormative) and its predominant ways of knowing and being (3). Findings from human genetics and genomics research subsequently play into existing sociopolitical dynamics by providing support for claims about putative differences between groups and the prevalence of particular traits in particular groups (3). Historically, such research has been used in support of eugenic movements to legitimize forced sterilization and genocides.  [JAC: this happened in the past and is not happening now.[ Yet it would be a mistake to assume that such research is merely a discredited past relic, a stain on the otherwise objective and rational track record of genetic research. Rather, it was mainstream work conducted by prominent researchers and supported by major professional societies. The reality is that some modern human genetics is still informed by the same racist logic (4). [JAC: no examples given.]

I’m not sure what the “racist logic” is here. If you look up reference (4), you don’t find evidence of “racist logic” in modern science, but a description of its use in older teachings and then a discussion about how one should conceive “ancestry”.  In fact, that reference gives evidence that there are average genetic differences between “races” even though populations vary continuously with geography and there are no diagnostic and fixed differences between named “races” (I prefer to use the term “geographic population”, a claim that Duncan et al, deny.  Luana Maroja and I, in our recent paper on ideology and science, show that even in America, typological “races” of “white, East Asian, Hispanic, and black” (“Hispanics” aren’t normally considered a race, but in America are distinct because they’re largely from Mexico), are not sociopolitical constructs lacking biological meaning, but do differ on average in traits and constellations of genes. From knowing only an American’s genes, you can guess their self-reported ancestry with over 99% accuracy.

What these differences mean for traits, behaviors, and medical outcomes is only beginning to be explored, but they reflect the geographic distribution of ancestors, for geographic isolation leads to genetic diffrences via natural selection and genetic drift. This is why genetic ancestry companies can give you a pretty accurate view of your genetic ancestry (I, for example, am nearly 100% Askhkenazi Jew). This wouldn’t work if geographic populations were genetically identical.

The purpose of the paper, then, is to expose and then dismantle the systematic racism of modern genetics education.  You must be “antiracist” rather than “race-neutral”— something that Kendi emphasizes in his book on antiracism—and must at every turn deny that human races or populations differ biologically, for that leads inevitably to ranking and racism. In other words, it’s bad for society to even study genetic differences between populations:

Genetic distinctions between human populations are not natural; they are the consequences of categorizations developed by geneticists for the purposes of their research and the questions they pursue.

. . . The search for genetic differences among populations, even when not done using explicit racial categories, can still yield findings that are problematic in that they can make social hierarchies appear “natural”. , ,  [JAC: they then cite the caste divisions in India, and I know little about that. But the point—that differences equal ranking and racism—is the same.]

. . . . Our contention here is that successful genetic education has to be antiracist, it cannot be race-neutral. Therefore, a core learning objective for human genetics education should be understanding that neither the environment nor scientists’ definitions of genetic populations are neutral but rather that they are shaped by the historical, social, and political contexts in which they exist.

Actually, one can parse out genetic groupings using statistics alone, free from “historical, social, and political contexts.”  Now what you call these groupings—races, ethnic groups, or populations—is arbitrary.

Further, the goal of genetics education must be dismantling this racism, not so much teaching how genetics works:

First, if one wishes to dismantle racism (and other systems of oppression) in science and society, then one needs to understand the ways in which such oppression is woven into the fabric of genetics research and disrupt and counteract these practices early and often through education.

But, as I said, the evidence for the ongoing racism of genetics is nil, and, in fact, the authors have to resort to making doubtful statements like this:

In this sense, the Human Genome Project was developed in, and sustained by, a sociopolitical context that upheld (and still upholds) value-laden group differences.

So the “sociopolitical context” was supposedly based on showing group differences that could be the basis of bigotry (not the case), but this “fact” is even used to tar the Human Genome Project, which was supposedly not only developed in the context of bigotry, but sustains that bigotry! To wit:

To dismantle racism, you must first recognize that racial differences are purely a social construct, but at the same time must recognize them, probably because these socially-constructed differences are correlated with well-being. (I of course don’t deny that racism has lowered the well-being of minorities, but also recognize that even to practice racism, one has to somehow recognize different populations, and that’s partly genetic, even if the genetic differences we see were only used as platforms for historical racism and bigotry.

And so we must avoid color-blindness because recognizing color (which of course is largely genetic) is said to be the key to eliminating disparities between races. (The authors barely mention hardly anything about socioeconomic differences within populations; their entire focus is on race.):

The understanding that race is not genetic (or biological) does not automatically translate into an understanding that race is a social construct, or that it can, and does, shape our biology. Moreover, knowing that race is a social construct does not automatically explain racial disparities in health or any other arena because it ignores the systemic nature of racism and the resulting inequities. Solely countering beliefs in race-based genetic differences and focusing on the similarities between racial groups obscures the real and devastating differences in the well-being of minoritized racial groups. This can lead to racial “color blindness” of a genetic flavor that sees everyone as the same and turns a blind eye to the impact of racism on people’s biology.
Finally the authors give three recommendations of how to teach genetics in both secondary (middle and high school) and postsecondary (college) genetics classes.

 

1.) Emphasize the sociopolitical context of the environment

2.) Entangle environment and biology.

3.) Scrutinize the sociopolitical categorization of human populations.

Point 1 is made to emphasize the debilitating effect of racist environments on minorities, point 2 is to show how the environment, which imposes differences on people via racism, has biological effects on people, and point 3  is to show how the definition and use of races has served the political ends of gaining power over others. The authors recommend some textbooks that will help create “brave and safe spaces” for students:

 There are powerful exemplars of curricula at the high school level that engage students with ambitious science, its sociopolitical dimensions, and a focus on social justice (13, 14). There is a growing number of excellent books (15) and online resources for anti-racist genetics and biology education—for example, the LabXchange’s “Racism as a Public Health Crisis” curriculum, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s materials on “Race, Racism, and Genetics.” These resources include supports for teachers in creating brave and safe spaces for discussions about race and genetics. Funding and committed support of national and professional science and science education organizations will also be instrumental for these efforts.

Of course using these books turns a genetics course into a course in antiracist ideology, so that there is less time for students to learn “race-neutral” genetics. But the authors don’t really care how much genetics students learn; they are far more concerned with propagandizing a generation of students to create the kind of social change they see as salubrious:

In the short term, we see scientists’ role in the education of future scientists and teachers as one powerful lever for change. Undergraduate coursework in biology and genetics, often taught by faculty in those departments, is a space where we can begin “sowing the seeds” of sociopolitical awareness in genetics.

Now I think it’s great to work to rid the world of what racism that still exists, though I don’t see much of it in genetics courses.  And I see nothing wrong, when you teach human genetics, with revealing the flaws in the old diagnostic “big-genetic-difference” view of human races, and emphasizing instead that they are populations that now intergrade, so the delineation of specific races becomes arbitrary. But one has to also tell the truth: races are populations that evolved in ancient geographical isolation, and there are real biological differences between them.  And, of course, one should at least insert the caveat that the differences that do exist do not efface the moral dictum that members of different groups have equal rights and deserve equal treatment.

The worst part of this paper—and the two papers that accompany it (one here, the other here)—is that it’s part of a nationwide drive to turn education into propaganda, and of to change the purpose of all education from teaching students the truth to teaching students the temporary and political “personal truths” of their woke overseers.