Reactionary Scientists Whine About Woke

In an era when science is under attack by the far right like never before, these guys know what they're really at war against

While researching for mah book that I’m writing, I came across a preorder listing for another book that seems right up my alley. That’s a dangerous thing to happen when I’m in the midst of a book buying spree. It’s called The War on Science, and it’s subtitled: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.

At a time when the Trump administration and evangelical theocrats on one side, and neoreactionary tech social engineers on the other, are together launching the biggest and broadest assault on scientific inquiry since the Enlightenment, and that’s exactly the type of thing I write about, I’d already heard enough. I was ready to hit that preorder button.

But I hadn’t heard enough. Thankfully before it was too late to halt my purchase finger screaming toward the mouse button my eyes drifted further downward to alight upon the fact that this book is edited by science’s biggest asshole.

Cool hat. Shit person.

Immediately I know everything I need to know about this book without even needing to crack it open. Seriously, that’s all I need—the title, the subtitle, the name of the editor. I’ve basically read this book now.

I’m fairly confident that there isn’t going to be a single word about the right’s catastrophic assault on science in this book. Or, okay, 70% confident. I decide I should go to the book’s website for some more information before I write it off completely, and oh god have mercy, would you look at that.

Question: Why would you bother paying 39 scientists when you could just pay Jesse Singal once to write 39 essays?

My assurance is locked. This is going to be a book about getting the woke out of science. At a time when the President of the United States is trying to shut down entire universities if they study transgenic mice because he’s uncomfortable with how much that word sounds like transgender, at a time when the top three medical authorities are cranks and conspiracy theorists who think the jury is out on germ theory, when actual scientists with spines are protesting for their very livelihoods in the face of massive layoffs, cuts, and ideological demands, these assholes are having a big old whine about the STEM equivalent of ethics in fucking games journalism.

I could write at length about the smug irony of this, about the fact that the only reason 39 cancelled assholes are bold enough to put this book together is because their guy won and he’s bulldozing the institutions and even though most of their non-famous scientific colleagues are going to lose their careers as collateral damage against the anti-woke wrecking ball, they know that their own careers will benefit massively. Because Cancelled isn’t really cancelled. Cancelled is the opposite of cancelled. They’re literally doing the Barry Deutsch cartoon:

I’d only heard of, like, 60% of the people on this list of contributors but that was enough for me to very confidently guess what’s entirely up with the other 40%. So I decided I’ll make this as much a mission of discovery for myself as it might be for you, as I research each and every one of these people, identify their grievances, and compile a kind of predictive review of what I expect this book to be like.

While I was researching I began to notice how many of the people on this list are associated with something called Heterodox Academy, as well as the right wing think tank, American Enterprise Institute, which I suspect, but cannot verify, might have funded this book.

Strap into your seats, friends. “39 scientists and scholars.” I’m about to review…

Dorian Abbot

Dr. Abbott is a Trump-supporting geophysics professor at the University of Chicago who was Cancelled in 2020 for writing a Newsweek op-ed about the encroachment of DEI into American academia, in which he casually compares modern DEI practices to the social conditions that led to Nazi Germany, because it “entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals.”

MIT wound up cancelling a speech that he’d been booked to present due to student backlash. Look, I understand that public communication can actually be kind of a minefield and sometimes you legitimately don’t expect to step on a particular mine, but there’s a pretty rule of thumb in general that you shouldn’t invoke The Holocaust for issues that are way less serious than The Holocaust.

For Abbot, this one cancelled speech is his entire life now. This is it. He didn’t get to do the “John Carlson Lecture” at MIT in 2020 just because of this one little white genocide thing that he said, and now this has become his career, because—again—being Cancelled is more lucrative than being a scientist. When this gravy train pulls into the station you have to get on board.

He has a Substack (a lot of these people do) and he talks about how to reform the university from within. It involves mandating “viewpoint diversity” which, to me, just feels like such an idiotic demand for the sciences. Science is already “viewpoint diverse” or else it wouldn’t work, but the goal of science isn’t permanent disagreement. This shouldn’t be difficult to understand. People who complain about a lack of “viewpoint diversity” in, for example, climate science, are nearly 100% of the time just complaining that not enough climate scientists think that climate change isn’t real.

He also recommends that universities “appoint a vocal Trump supporter as the director of the Institute of Politics.” Because, holy shit, yes, Donald Trump, famous supporter of viewpoint diversity. Sorry Dorian, big time loser I’ve typed way too many words about, now moving on.

John Armstrong

I don’t actually know which John Armstrong this refers to because there’s a bunch of them and, contextually, I don’t think it would be the Scottish-Australian philosopher who collaborated with Alain De Botton on Art as Therapy.

I think it’s more likely to be this ludicrous person from King’s College London who thinks feral indigenous tribespeople are trying to ooga-booga their way into western mathematics and force physicists to factor the Māori Sun God Tama-nui-te-rā into their equations.

It’s kind of funny to watch the number of times the host of this interview tries turns the dial toward some hard-R racism and Armstrong seems to know just well enough to put the brakes on it.

His Twitter feed is just an absolutely endless assault on transgender people, which, just a heads up, is going to be a running theme here.

Peter Boghossian

Oddly enough the fact that Peter Boghossian closely associates with white supremacists isn’t what most people know him for and isn’t enough to dismiss his Cancellation complaints out of hand. Ordinarily I could end this just by mentioning that he’s a good friend and regular collaborator with Stefan Molyneaux, an alt-right lunatic so repulsive that he makes James Lindsay look like a normal person, conveniently, because Boghossian collaborates with him as well.

But Boghossian is allowed leeway because he is a philosopher and philosophers are allowed to hang out with anyone. We bring it on ourselves, really—if Heidegger gets a pass, then we really have to let this one go. Besides, Boghossian says he agrees with Molyneaux’s metaphysics and not his notions about the natural inferiority of nonwhite races. Then again, I dunno, if you legitimately cannot find someone who agrees with you on metaphysics who isn’t also a Nazi then maybe you’re wrong about the metaphysics too?

Anyway, I digress. Boghossian is best known for thinking the social sciences, or “grievance studies” as he dismissingly calls them, are bullshit, and to prove this he wrote a bunch of nonsense articles to social science journals to see if they would get published, and some of them did! Most of them didn’t, but some of them did!

Actually it kind of sounds like he’s the one waging war on science here, and also sorta failing?

Maarten Boudry

Never heard of this guy before, but he’s a philosophy professor who’s writing his own book titled The Betrayal of the Enlightenment: How Progressives Lost Their Way (and Can Find It Back).

His blurb:

Western civilization seems to have lost its belief in the Enlightenment project—the ambition to continually improve the world through science, technology, human reason, and the free exchange of ideas. For two centuries so-called “progressives” were the main champions of these Enlightenment ideals. Today, however, many progressives have grown disillusioned with the revolution of ideas that first burst onto the scene in Western Europe, and with the whole idea of “progress”.

Industrial modernity, they claim, is destroying our planet. Globalised capitalism is a force of ruthless exploitation and leads to an ever widening gap between rich and poor. Endless economic growth is a dangerous fantasy. And the Enlightenment project was never more than a fig leaf for cultural supremacy and colonialism.

Oh, so he’s one of those guys who thinks any attack on industry, capital, imperialism or oligarchy is an attack on science itself by idiots who think climate change exists. Cool, can’t wait to line my birdcage with that original thought.

Alex Byrne

Anti-transgender philosophy professor. Oxford University Press Cancelled his book deal because they thought the book was shit. Looks like he immediately got it published by somebody else, so wow, that sounds like it was an unpleasant hour and a half. I wish I was brave enough to hold an opinion that it’s basically illegal not to hold now.

Nicholas Christakis

Christakis is a famous sociologist who found himself the centre of a huge campus protest at Yale in 2015. Basically the university sent out an email to students saying to please not wear racist Halloween costumes. Christakis’ wife, Erika, who also works at Yale, then sent out another email that said actually it’s okay to wear racist Halloween costumes. Like, if you really wanna.

The result blew up like crazy and Nicholas got involved because I guess he’s a wife guy which is absolutely fine, I mean I’m a wife guy, but he’s astronomically more famous than she is. It’s like if, I don’t know, Tom Hanks’ wife said something a bit shitty and he had to step in and take a bunch of heat for it.

Nicholas Christakis is probably the most famous person on this list of contributors who is famous for not being shit, and the Yale Halloweengate thing was actually kind of both-sides-ish, So the confusing thing for me is Jesus Christ what are you doing in this book? What are you doing here Nicholas Christakis? You are surrounded by assholes! Why?

Roger Cohen

Right, so, legitimately don’t know who this one is. The most prominent person with this name is a New York Times reporter who has worked most famously as a wartime foreign correspondent, but doesn’t seem to have done anything relevant to science or academia. Searching “Roger Cohen scientist” only brings up a physicist who died in 2016. I guess they might have included something old he wrote because he seems to fit the profile—he worked for Exxon in order to help them discredit climate science—so to his family I’m sorry for your loss but also fuck him a bit?

Jerry Coyne

Anti-transgender New Atheist who resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation because they weren’t anti-transgender enough. Made a show of it. Probably often bitter about being basically a Temu Richard Dawkins who is always being upstaged by—

Richard Dawkins

What’s new that I can say here about the world’s smartest dumb person? Richard Dawkins is the second most famous and maybe even the second most important evolutionary biologist in history, in both cases standing only in the shadow of Charles Darwin. He revolutionized the field with his work fleshing out the gene theory of evolution, identifying that the gene, not the species, is the fundamental unit of selection. He might be considered the Stephen Hawking to Darwin’s Einstein. He is a tower of intellect in this single very specific field of science.

In every single other area of knowledge known to mankind he is absolute Patrick Star levels of dumb. Just an absolute bonkers human being, a total disaster person. He’s also known for his atheism book but he didn’t even write the best atheism book that year (that was Hitchens).

When Dawkins finally got himself Cancelled it was likewise for the dumbest reason ever. The popular skeptic and YouTuber Rebecca Watson briefly mentioned in a video that she’d had a mildly uncomfortable encounter with a fan in an elevator, which led Dawkins to go off on a shrill, unhinged, antifeminist tirade for some reason that never really ended. The affair wound up getting him disinvited from a skeptics conference, and then he had a stroke, which was probably completely unrelated, but led to legions of Dawkins fanboys to claim that feminism tried to kill Richard Dawkins. I’m putting a whole chapter about this and related buffoonery in my upcoming book!

Niall Ferguson

Sir Niall Ferguson is a Glaswegian arch-conservative Thatcherite historian who loves white imperialism and hates being called racist for it.

My best guess about his inclusion in this book is that it has to do with the time that he invited the notorious “race scientist” Charles Murray (whose book, The Bell Curve, posits that race is connected to intelligence) to speak on campus and there was a student backlash. Ferguson conspired with campus Republicans to “grind them down” because we all know that truly free speech means being liberated from the speech of other people.

Janice Fiamengo

Rabidly antifeminist Men’s Rights Activist and token “one of the good ones” female leader of the manosphere, Fiamengo is who you hire as a contributor when you want to include the Return to Kings perspective but have enough self-awareness not to book Andrew Tate.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bluesky?

Solveig Gold

Arising, perhaps, merely from the fact that the contributors are arranged alphabetically, Solveig Gold appears here even though she’s just the wife of another contributor who appears further down on the list.

I don’t say “just the wife” to be dismissive about her personhood. I just mean that’s basically what she’s known for. She wrote an op-ed for Bari Weiss titled “What Princeton Did to My Husband” and that’s about it. On Twitter she refers to herself as “Princeton’s resident blonde Christofascist tradwife.” She has fewer followers than me and man I do not have many followers. Kind of odd that she made the cut of “39 renowned scientists and scholars.”

Something else that makes you think… her Twitter feed is full of Solveig celebrating Trump’s relentless assault on science and education. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? I mean, for this book, that’s kind of weird.

Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven

Assorted anti-transgender activists. They’re really just packing the seats now. Two of these three don’t have a Wikipedia page. I know that’s not the benchmark for notability but when you have a list of 39 renowned scientists and scholars to pad out and by #12 you’re already trawling Twitter for random people quote-tweeting JK Rowling that’s not a good sign.

Geoff Horsman

Canadian Biochemist who led one (1) policy brief on the feasibility of DEI (or EDI as it’s apparently called in Canada, probably because of the metric system) that isn’t even hysterical and makes some valid points. He’s clearly one of the authors they hired after the budget ran out (Dawkins ain’t cheap) but nevertheless I figured he might be someone worth listening to.

Then again he’s one of like 50 listed authors on the brief. I think you can get some pretty good insight into someone by what kind of content they consume so I checked out his Substack profile and he’s subscribed to a bunch of crackpots so never mind.

Joshua Katz

Former Princeton linguist. Husband of the aforementioned Christofascist tradwife Solveig Gold. His Cancellation involves writing a Quillette article condemning a group of peaceful campus Black Rights protestors as a terrorist group, which is kind of a bizarre escalation on his part. Still, it’s within his first amendment rights, and stuff, and that tends to be the focus of the media instead of the fact that he was actually fired for being kind of a sex pest, and Gold isn’t the only one of his students that he’d slept with. Man this “war on science” is getting a little oblique, right?

Sergiu Klainerman

Professor of mathematics, and it shows, because he can’t write worth shit.

That doesn’t stop him from trying, though. There’s a bunch of articles for usual suspects outlets like Quillette that read like they were spat out by a large language model that was trained only on right wing tweets.

The Woke ideology, dominant in almost all our universities today, holds two contradictory notions of reality: One, postmodernist in nature, according to which truth is a social construct determined solely by contests of power, and another one according to which it alone is in the possession of the ultimate Truth. The Woke ideology's belief system divides people based on the perceived position of power of the group, or groups, to which the people belong, according to a crude scheme of "intersectionality." The proposed remedy to this is a reparation strategy that calls for affirmative action and reverse discrimination. The ideology underlies many things we now associate with campus culture such as critical race theory, queer theory, and, most importantly, the administrative monster that is DEI. Like all totalitarian ideologies that claim to be in sole possession of the Truth, the Woke ideology rejects free inquiry and robust debate, which are denounced as tools of oppression. In the name of higher morality, fanatics "cancel" those who challenge it, and seek to compel all others to pledge fealty to it.

That, sir, is MAGA Madlibs. You are opening up the reply thread to an Elon Musk tweet and throwing darts at it. That is a string of incomprehensible illiterate garbage, professor. Accuse me of being jealous, if you want, that he got a book deal—you’d be one hundred percent correct. This guy’s brain is pudding.

He loves Ron DeSantis, by the way, which … again, that’s a little weird, isn’t it, for a book about the “war on science” that is, ostensibly, on the side of science? To champion a guy who is leading the biggest attacks on science and education in the country? Little strange, maybe?

Lawrence M. Krauss

I guess it makes sense, if you’re putting together a book of academics bitching about how Cancelled they are, that the name you would put on the cover would be the most toxic serial sex pest in all of academia. A man who’s drawn more “me toos” than the Romans who tried to weed out Spartacus.

Krauss claims that the scores if not dozens of sexual harassment accusations levied at him are just because he’s famous. That’s a very strange thing, though, for a man who has made his career out of being a champion of skepticism to fall back on—most famous people on either side of the Krauss on the fame and riches scale just don’t receive anywhere near that number of harassment accusations. Most of them don’t receive many at all, especially if they’re not actually doing that stuff. Even bolder, Krauss completely denies every single one of the allegations. Even Kevin Spacey didn’t deny all the allegations!

Krauss is also a vocal defender of Elon Musk putting a chainsaw to science funding, which is, you know, an idiotic thing to be doing when you’re listed as the editor of this particular book. Oh, but he thinks the financial squeeze will just force science to cut all its woke DEI programs! Sure, man!

You know who else Krauss is a vocal defender of? Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t mean he’s a defender of per-revelation just-a-famous-rich-dude Epstein, I mean he’s a defender of post-incarceration for underage sex crimes convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And man… he has the nerve to think he’s Cancelled? If you’re still able to show your face in public, let alone publish a book, then you are the least cancelled Jeffrey Epstein defender in existence, okay? Moving on.

Anna Krylov

Chemistry professor who wrote an article for an academic journal in which she describes how renaming stuff that was named after Nazis is bad because it’s what Stalin did. The article is peppered with pictures of scientists who were forced to work in a potato field in the Communist USSR and this is what will happen to America if you rename the “Shockley–Queisser maximum efficiency limit” because William Shockley hated black people.

She also lists a lot of scary and absurd theoretical language policing examples that either literally nobody on earth or very close to nobody is actually calling for, like banning the word “picnic” or removing Isaac Newton from history books for being white.

Very cool. Hey, did you know that the Trump administration has a massive list of words that you’re literally not allowed to say in government funded scientific research now? At some point Anna Krylov imagined that someone might yell at her for saying “brown bag lunch,” and she’s complaining about that while in the meantime she will literally lose a government contract if a crawler bot detects that her study contains the words “systemic,” “transition,” or “carbon,” and that’s going to be fun, isn’t it? In your field of (checks notes) ah yes, chemistry.

Luana Maroja

Anti-transgender biologist who sounds like she kinda wants to do some race realism, but that’s a bit scary. Gotta tread carefully around that, doc, make sure you use words like “heritability” and “ethnicity” instead of “race.” Make sure you say stuff like “school performance” instead of “intelligence.” Dancing a little close to that Cancel button. You got this!

Christian Ott

All righty, I’m starting to pick up a pattern among a bunch of these authors, and that is that a lot of them seem confused about why they can’t sexually harass their students. Again, I haven’t read this book and even though a suspicious number of its contributors got in trouble for being sex pests I have no idea if that’s what they’re actually going to write about.

For Christian Ott, that’s basically all he’s known for, though? Really the only thing there is to know about him is this creepy story about how he kept “falling in love with” his female students in ways that weren’t actually reciprocal. It’s not even really something he’s denying, either, so, okay?

It also leads into a buried lede about the worrying prevalence of sexual harassment of female students in science—which is very evident within this book’s contributor list alone—and I think that’s kind of the bigger story when it comes to hostile interactions in academia, right? I mean what are we doing here—joining the war on sexual harassment in science, on the side of sexual harassment in science?

Bruce Pardy

Law professor, another anti-woke Madlibs kind of character. The funniest thing I could find to say about him is that he wants Alberta to secede from Canada and be annexed by the United States. I guess the French are too woke?

Jordan Peterson

?????????? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahhahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahaha holy shit

Steven Pinker

Pinker is often described as a “public intellectual” which is a polite way of saying “jack of all trades but master of none.” I always confuse him with Malcolm Gladwell. He writes the kinds of books that you find at the airport. Though he’s one of the biggest names on this list he kind of just fades into the general background of anti-woke centrist pop science communicators. His work also tends to lack intellectual rigor since, in his vaguely apolitical blandness, he’s as likely to cite far right smart-sounding pseudointellectuals like Steve Sailer as real scientists to bolster his conclusions.

Fascinatingly enough, he’s only just now started doing interviews—like this one for a French news site—explaining that Trump is much worse for science than whatever woke is. So that’s embarrassing!

Also, I’m sorry, but Jordan Peterson? Seriously?

Richard Redding

Okay so back in 2012 a sociologist Mark Regnerus did a study that purported to reveal that same-sex couples make bad parents.

The study was wrong. That is to say, its methodology was badly flawed and there were all sorts of other problems with it.

This guy, law professor Richard Redding, doesn’t deny that this study was shit, but still thinks that it’s wrong that people attacked it, because he feels they attacked it on ideological grounds and before attacking its terrible methodology people were quicker to accuse Regnerus of having ulterior motives. Which he did.

For this reason, Redding feels that the social sciences need greater diversity of views. Weird that he couldn’t make his point using a study that people were actually wrong to criticize.

Arthur Rousseau

Okay I have no idea who this is referring to. Google brings up zero notable living people, and one of the results of this name alone is just Krauss’ Facebook announcement about this very book.

There was a prominent Quebec physician named Arthur Rousseau who died in 1934. The only biography written in English that I can find makes him sound really great. He saved a lot of people from tuberculosis. Good job, Arthur.

Meanwhile I’m a little concerned that Lawrence Krauss may be padding his contributor list out with people invented by AI, because a turn of last century French Canadian doctor probably had little to say about wokeness.

Jordan Peterson doesn’t believe in climate change, by the way. Sorry for changing the subject but he once said that climate science is wrong because nobody knows where carbon comes from or what climate is. Jordan Peterson once argued with Richard Dawkins about whether dragons exist.

Gad Saad

Everyone assumes that Gad Saad is a psychologist or something but he’s a professor of marketing. Other than that he’s a far-right virulent racist who thinks empathy is a suicidal mental disorder. In fact he’s the reason Elon Musk keeps saying that—Musk always thought that, but he didn’t have a pseudointellectual basis for it until Saad came along. Won’t shut up about racial inferiority and uses the R-word like a comma.

He’s also a massive fan of Musk and Trump’s evisceration of science, research, funding, and institutions, so that’s weird.

Biggest piece of shit on a list of people that also includes an Epstein supporter.

Sally Satel

Sally Satel is so oldschool she was writing books complaining about woke back when it was still called “political correctness.”

She’s also a Purdue Pharma shill who helped them cover up the opioid crisis. I guess pharmaceuticals involve science, so in that regard, taking down Purdue is sort of a War on Science. Lex Luthor is also a scientist.

Lauren Schwartz

The best known Lauren Schwartz is an African-American basketball coach but I’m putting my money on the book contributor being this anti-transgender activist. In either case neither are a “renowned scientist or scholar.”

Jordan Peterson claims he literally only eats steak and water, except one time he took one sip of cider and almost died, but although he survived he didn’t sleep for 25 days.

Alan Sokal

Much like Peter Boghossian, Alan Sokal’s most prominent claim to fame is that time he submitted a fake article for publication in a cultural studies journal and then mocked them for running it. At this point it’s pertinent to question how much of the “War on Science” is just scientists attacking each other. You know, more like a civil war, except one side is more racist, which is kind of how most civil wars are.

Allesandro Strumia

Strumia is an Italian physicist who worked with CERN and did a study on gender discrimination that purported to conclude that it is in fact men who are discriminated against in science, not women. He swiftly got Cancelled for merely revealing inconvenient truths through scientific rigor.

Oh, actually it was when he told a room full of women scientists that physics was invented and built by men.

Also it turns out that the study he conducted was highly flawed methodologically, which is the kind of thing that people tend to examine when some study reveals something that is sort of the opposite of what all the other studies say.

Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan

You know, I’m just talking purely stylistically at this point, but I wonder if they’re going to put all of the anti-trans stuff together, like, at the beginning or if they’ll space it out evenly throughout the book? On one hand, if they pack it together it will be more obvious that the book leans heavily into one complaint across all of science, but on the other hand it makes it easier to skip when it starts to feel like they’re repeating the same words over and over again. Anyway, guess what these ladies mostly talk about.

Jay Tanzman

Okay this is nuts, but “Jay Tanzman” turns out to be the most interesting character in this whole thing, and not because of anything that we know about Jay Tanzman (which is nothing). Let me explain:

You remember Anna Krylov from earlier? The one who was worried about the removal of Nazi language from scientific terms being a slippery slope to the Khmer Rouge?

I started to wonder at first if this Jay Tanzman character might just be, sort of, an imaginary friend of hers. Or like a husband, maybe, or at a stretch some kind of George/Kuato situation. Stephen King once wrote a book about a writer’s pseudonym who came to life through supernatural means and started killing people. In any case I was trying to figure out who this person is but the internet didn’t seem to carry any record of a “Jay Tanzman” except as listed as a co-author to Anna Krylov, where he (she?) turns up frequently.

Tanzman has an ORCID as an individual researcher, but no bio, either in ORCID or ResearchGate. This is just a name that pops up whenever Anna Krylov writes something. The only evidence I can find on a “Jay Tanzman” as a real individual person is that Google image search gives you a whole bunch of pictures of a man scaling cliff faces. Same man, different cliffs, with no further comment.

But then, deep searching for “Tanzman” brought up some references to something called “Tanzman Statistical Consulting.” It doesn’t have its own website but it does seem to be a business registered to somebody named Jay Tanzman.

I think that Anna Krylov hires an independent statistician to help her with numbers, that his input is so extensive that she has to name him as a co-author, and that Lawrence Krauss is thus listing this consultant as one of 39 Renowned Scientists and Scholars because Krylov needed to hire a whole other person to check if her numbers were bullshit.

There are a few names on this list whose identity I wasn’t able to lock down, and now I’m wondering how many of them are just, like, someone else’s editor. Amazing.

Abigail Thompson

Thompson is or was the vice president of the American Mathematical Society and in 2019 she penned a short essay that directly compares “diversity statements” in hiring practices to, uh, 1950s McCarthyism.

By which she means: requiring job applicants to answer questions about their commitment to diversity in academia is a political test that weeds out “classical liberals” (which she seems to define as people who believe everyone should be treated the same and thus don’t give one shit about diversity) in the same way that McCarthyism weeded out communists.

It’s these kinds of cute “gotcha” comparisons that really drive home for me the fact that these people can’t seem to figure out whether they want diversity in academia or if they want groupthink. Because you kind of get one or the other. It’s doubly hilarious that if McCarthy jumped out of the grave today and said “I’m purging the universities of commies again, motherfuckers” most of these people would be on board with it.

Amy Wax

Rubbing my temples in slow circular motions now.

You don’t need to be putting Amy Wax in your book, man. We’ve reached the end of the alphabet and I’m wondering now if this list includes any living academic more cartoonishly evil—oh no (furiously scans the rest of the list for Andrew Wakefield)

Elizabeth Weiss

Okay good, there’s no Wakefield. Just this anthropologist who thinks that respecting the feelings of Indigenous people about the repatriation of their ancestral remains is superstitious nonsense and those bones rightfully belong to science.

Frances Widdowson

I have to admit that I can’t fully understand, grasp, or grok the drama and lore of Frances Widdowson.

It appears she’s a political scientist who started shitposting about her colleagues in public on Twitter and then started lodging official complaints about them when they retaliated. The words “Twitter War” keep coming up in all the articles about her and I think that’s about as far as my patience permits me to explore.

Annoying Twitter drama isn’t exactly the most spectacular punchline I could end this journey on, but the authors are listed alphabetically and the alphabet doesn’t follow a narrative structure. In a way it does make a point: The absurd Twitterishness of this whole “anti-woke” project is a profound distraction from the very real, measurable harms that the far right is doing to science, and tens of thousands of serious scientists are losing their studies, their projects, their jobs, their careers over it.

In the Lawrence Krauss camp, he could barely find 39. But shit, he’s going to sell some books.

Talking about selling books, I’m writing one in which I’m going to be talking more about several of the bastards whose names appeared in this article. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.