River News: Our View

The nation’s scientific establishment has weighed in on the presidential election and, to no one’s surprise, they have chosen whom they think is the candidate who embodies scientific integrity and trust: Kamala Harris.

We’ll pause a bit here for the laughing to stop, or the cackling, as the case may be.

That’s right, earlier this month Scientific American, that iconic magazine of American science, chose to endorse Vice President Harris, only the second time in its history it has waded into the weeds of politics. The first time was for Joe Biden.

We’ll pause a few seconds more to allow time for you to get up off the floor.

The endorsement follows a similar endorsement of Harris by Nature magazine. 

To be sure, these two endorsements are instructive, not so much as a guide on how to vote but as a primer on the nature of the scientific establishment. For while these publishers have every right to endorse anyone or no one, they are broadcasting to everyone the inner workings and sobering bias that haunts today’s science and today’s scientific world. 

To be blunt, what is going on is an extraordinary prostitution of science itself for raw political power and ideological gain.

While Scientific American and Nature want you to follow science — let us rephrase that, they want you to follow their science — into the voting booth, to do so would actually lead voters right off a cliff and down to the valley below — the same valley where scientific integrity previously perished during the years of the pandemic.

There’s a reason why these magazines never endorsed political candidates in the past. That’s because their editors and publishers knew that to “politicize” science was the first step in killing science. It’s important here to differentiate “politicize” from “democratize.” To politicize science — which is what the scientific establishment is doing — is to shrink wrap “science” in an infallible narrative that can never be questioned. 

To politicize means to take sides, no matter what, to advocate for an ideological position; the scientific method never takes sides — it pummels the consensus opinion with relentless questioning, no matter the ideology.

Sometimes the consensus opinion survives, sometimes it is modified, sometimes it collapses and is replaced with a new consensus opinion, which in turn is ruthlessly questioned. That’s how progress is made, in both the scientific world and in a democratic republic.

Now, instead of relentless questioning, we have the endorsement by the scientific establishment of Harris. That’s incredible because the “science” being peddled by the Biden-Harris administration during the pandemic — and which the vice president was vocal in supporting, as was the scientific establishment — was junk, as we now know in retrospect. 

So that’s why it is laughable when Scientific American writes that the country faces two possible futures and describes the future with Harris this way: “In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience.”

Seriously? Did she offer the country better prospects during the pandemic? Did she rely on real science during the pandemic? Did she put forth to the people solid evidence?

Well, you judge. Here’s Kamala Harris in July of 2021, speaking in Detroit, telling everyone to get vaccinated because vaccinated people did not end up in hospitals and vaccinated people did not die.

“And even more, regrettably, virtually every person who has recently died from Covid-19 was unvaccinated,” she said. “The loss. The tragedy of that loss. Literally every person who has died from Covid 19 that we have recently seen was unvaccinated.”

That was a lie, and the numbers were known even then. As the vice president was speaking, the vaccinated were dying — 616 alone reported among fully vaccinated people between April of that year and the day she spoke. 

She also let everyone know that everyone in the hospital was unvaccinated. More lies. 

As vice president, she supported the idea of mandatory vaccination — a threat to civil liberties — and she supported a national mask mandate, even though actual scientists were warning as early as April of 2020 that decades of mask studies decisively showed that masks — except for respirator masks — simply did not work.

The science establishment embraced masks anyway and conjured new studies — virtually all of them flawed — to make their case. Is this what Scientific American believes is solid evidence?

Then there was the six-foot social-distancing rule. Now we know, thanks to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent admission, that that was an arbitrary number plucked out of thin air. But that was the standard, hawked by the science establishment.

Is this what Scientific American means by relying on science — relying on  Fauci’s made-up proclamations based on nothing more than it sounded good?

Meanwhile, as they were pushing “science” that suddenly contradicted decades of studies, and as they pushed profit-mongering Big Pharma’s vaccines without the rigorous testing that had been previously required, true scientific inquiry was shut down.

With the support of the “science establishment,” the Biden-Harris administration built a massive and unprecedented censorship complex inside the executive branch of government, whose main aim was to censor any questioning of the “new science.” 

Suddenly, it was alright to produce overnight stories to challenge decades of previous consensus, but it was not okay to question the overnight studies. And you were canceled if you tried to. Is this what Scientific American means by learning from experience?

These days, we know the vaccines did not work. We know the vaccines did not prevent infection, the vaccines did not prevent hospitalizations, and the vaccines did not prevent death. Not that they weren’t useful for some with compromised immune systems or for the very, very elderly, but they also came with potentially serious vaccine injury consequences. 

Yet to this day, the scientific establishment continues to peddle them as “safe and effective,” rather than bluntly acknowledge both the potential benefits and the potential risks.

So here is what Scientific American is doing. They refuse to acknowledge their own hijacking of scientific inquiry for ideological purposes as they endorse the stooge who mindlessly and falsely mouthed their propaganda during the pandemic.

In these editorial pages, we have warned time and again that what was coming out of the scientific establishment was not science but pure partisan Democratic politics, and these endorsements are the ultimate proof of that.

When science becomes politicized, its no longer science, it’s ideology. 

It’s faith-based politics, and it is not compatible with the scientific method.

And that’s what this endorsement is: ideology.

If past is prologue, we can see just what kind of science we are going to get with a President Harris. To be sure, the corrupt science establishment will be emboldened and it will consolidate its power over true scientists who seek truth through constant inquiry, not power through “settled science.”

The editors over at Scientific American went even further in their political charade. They also took time to disparage Donald Trump by repeating known falsehoods, such as that he advised Americans to inject bleach as a Covid cure.

If they are this dishonest before an election, imagine how they will be once their power is reaffirmed. Well, honestly we don’t have to imagine, we have already seen them at work. It’s only a shame that the nation as a whole doesn’t seem to be outraged by the destruction of their constitution and civil liberties.

The magazine editors also went all in on the “climate crisis” even as new and credible claims that the climate crisis has been juiced by government manipulation of numbers emerged within the U.S. House science subcommittee this week.

The editors also criticized Trump’s support for “a work requirement as a condition for Medicaid eligibility.” How is that anti-science, unless one believes that ever bigger government and ever more unconditional welfare is the scientifically established only way to reduce poverty in the United States? 

News flash: It isn’t.

The editorial criticized Trump for not speaking up about gun violence, even after two assassination attempts, as if gun control and/or gun confiscation is the scientifically established solution to gun violence.

News flash: It’s isn’t.

All totaled, it was a political editorial that strayed far from the lanes of science. And even when it was in the scientific lanes, it ignored the speed bumps of scientific inquiry and “solid evidence.”

The editorial did expose one truth: Those who say “follow the science” these days are actually saying follow the Democrats — right into the voting booth and then right off the cliff on the other side.

RIP scientific integrity. RIP America.