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So, a number of you have let me know that there’s a hot new book coming out soon all about The War on Science. Now, it’s not out yet so obviously I haven’t read it but I’m pretty pumped because I enjoyed the first one, The Republican War on Science, which was published twenty years ago and so is obviously due for an update. It’s weird, though, that this one has dropped the “Republican” part because it seems like the attacks on science ARE coming almost exclusively from Republicans, as I detailed in my previous video about how the Trump administration is disappearing published research that conflicts with their worldview and bullying editors of scientific journals to “present both sides” of pulmonary embolisms or whatever, and defunding important scientific institutions.
So yeah, it’s weird that Chris Mooney would drop the word “Republican” from the title for this updated version because that makes me think that he now thinks that the war on science is NOT solely, or even primarily, Republican. It suggests a bipartisan war, at best, and a Democratic war at worst, right? Hold on, let me just zoom in on the author, here…oh, it’s NOT from Chris Mooney. It’s a collection of essays edited by Lawrence Krauss. Weird! Let’s have a look at the publisher’s description:
“From assaults on merit-based hiring to the policing of language and replacing well-established, disciplinary scholarship by ideological mantras, current science and scholarship is under threat throughout western institutions. As this group of prominent scholars ranging across many different disciplines and political leanings detail, the very future of free inquiry and scientific progress is at risk. Many who have spoken up against this threat have lost their positions, and a climate of fear has arisen that strikes at the heart of modern education and research. Banding together to finally speak out, this brave and unprecedented group of scholars issues a clarion call for change.
“Topics include: Free speech, victimhood, ideology, corruption of academic disciplines, cancel culture, DEI, gender, and race, and what we can do.
“Higher education isn’t what it used to be. Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book. This collection of essays tells of threats to open inquiry, free speech, and the scientific process itself. A much-needed book.”—Sabine Hossenfelder, Physicist and Author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.”
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh there it is. If you missed my previous videos about Sabine Hossenfelder, she’s the disgraced former physicist-turned-YouTuber who thinks that the researchers who have found that science-based trans healthcare saves lives are “crazy.”
And so the choice to have her blurb in this summary caused me to notice a few names in the list of contributors to “The War on Science” who seem to share a similar anti-science view. Particularly, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne. I mean, I’m sure many of the names on that list share that view but these three jumped out at me because of an event that occurred recently in the atheist community: all three were honorary board members of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1978 by the feminist freethinker Annie Nicol Gaylor to fight for the continued separation of Church and State in the US.
But a few months ago, Pinker, Dawkins, and Coyne all resigned from the board because FFRF decided to remove a post Coyne made about transgender people. Why would they remove it? Well, just to pick one sentence, Coyne claimed “Transgender (sic), then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders,” based on one transphobic group’s claim that 60 trans people in England and Wales’ prisons are sex offenders, which is a slightly higher percentage than the number of cis men in those prisons who are sex offenders. That’s right, sixty people. In prison. Used to justify the claim that trans people are twice as likely as cis men to commit sex crimes.
Here’s a related statistic: black people make up 40% of the population of US prisons despite only being about 14% of the general population. Does Jerry Coyne think that means that black people are more likely to commit crimes?
You know what, that’s a bad example because honestly, I think he probably does believe that. How about this: the number of US federal prisoners who are protestant is only about 29%, despite the fact that they represent 44% of the US population. Does that mean that Protestants are less likely than, say, Jews to commit crimes? Or Buddhists?
No, you fucking drooling halfwit, it doesn’t, just like a handful of shitty trans people in prison doesn’t tell us anything about the total population of trans people.
Despite this complete lack of evidence, Coyne uses it to insist that trans women should be prohibited from certain jobs, like serving “as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters” and “if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison,” because he thinks trans women are “more predatory” than cis women or men.
When FFRF deleted Coyne’s post, he resigned in protest. Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker agreed with him so wholeheartedly that, yes, trans women are more predatory and cannot be trusted in certain jobs, that they resigned as well. And now all three are contributors to Lawrence Krauss’s new collection of essays about the “threat” of “gender” and “cancel culture.”
It’s fascinating to me that they decided to contribute to this anthology, in particular, in the wake of their “brave” resignations. Because now I’d like to tell you a little bit about the editor, Lawrence Krauss.
If you know anything about Lawrence Krauss, you might know that he’s a theoretical physicist who has written more than a dozen well-received popular science books. And if you know anything else about Lawrence Krauss, you know that he’s a sniveling, unctuous sex pest who has been credibly accused many, many times of sexual harassment and assault by various women, and that he vociferously defended his good friend Jeffrey Epstein.
The Epstein connection was the first time I realized something wasn’t quite right with Krauss. Back in 2011, a reader of my blog, Skepchick, emailed me with a concerning quote. The Daily Beast reported that Krauss was asked about his relationship with the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and he was quoted as saying:
““If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.””
I had met Krauss before very briefly and had read some of his writings and couldn’t imagine he would say something so bonkers. So I reached out via email to get the full context that this reporter clearly omitted. What I got stunned me, not just because Krauss doubled down on his support of his sex offender friend, but because the emails I received looked and sounded like they were written by a semi-literate ten year old boy. In a typo-written screed, Krauss accused the underage girls of targeting Jeffrey Epstein and victimizing HIM. When I asked if I could post his reply in full, he said yes and wanted this part added, in which he brought up “rumors” I had never even heard of, that Krauss himself had engaged in orgies on Epstein’s island, and insisted they were NOT true. Which…yeah that’s a weird thing to introduce to the conversation.
Krauss then continued battling for Epstein in the comments. It was truly surreal at the time, but in the years since things became clearer as I heard from more and more women that Krauss was, in fact, a big ol’ sex pest. I even heard accounts from employees of Center for Inquiry who said that a woman reported Krauss for sexually harassing her and making her deeply uncomfortable when he was the featured speaker on one of their cruises and he suggested she join him and his wife in a threesome. Several employees tried to get CFI director Ron Lindsay to stop inviting Krauss on the annual cruises, which he refused.
Eventually, a team of reporters at Buzzfeed decided to collect all the credible accounts about Krauss that they could confirm. In addition to the cruise ship story, they found that Krauss had also:
* pushed a woman down onto the bed of his hotel room and grabbed her crotch, which she told friends at the time was completely non consensual
* invited to dinner an undergraduate student at the university where he was a full professor…the student wrote about it in the school paper without naming Krauss, but his reputation for sexually harassing undergrads was so well-known that the dean figured out it was him and asked the student to make an official complaint. The number of complaints resulted in Case Western banning him from stepping foot on campus without prior approval
*got banned from ever returning to lecture at the Perimeter Institute due to an incident they wouldn’t detail due to privacy concerns
*groped the legs of another undergrad at an atheist conference, against her will
*grabbed the breast of a woman who attended one of his lectures after she asked for a selfie
*sexually harassed his employees and undergrads at Arizona State so often that they started keeping lists of the incidents and freely announced that he was a “sexist” and a “womanizer.” One example was that he admitted he didn’t hire women of “child-bearing age” to avoid paying for maternity leave, and asked one employee if she was on birth control so that she wouldn’t inconvenience him.
Eight months after that article, Buzzfeed followed up with a treasure trove of documents on Krauss’s predatory behavior, just from Arizona State:
“He propositioned a prospective employee, suggesting a threesome. He told one employee that she should “take one for the team” and date a donor who was attracted to her. He discussed strip clubs with his staff. And when challenged on his actions, he tried to pass it all off as a joke.”
They found that he also groped the thigh of another atheist activist, Cristina Rad, “discussed strip clubs with employees, encouraged staff to view fan mail including nude photos, and showed them a cartoon of a person bent over with their pants down, revealing their bare buttocks.
“The report also described how Krauss and an employee, whose name is redacted, “engaged in conduct towards one another — hugging, touching, kissing — in the presence of staff, giving the perception to current and former staff members that they were involved in an intimate relationship.” Krauss and the employee denied there was an intimate relationship, and stated that the interactions were “a form of greeting.””
Finally, there’s a record of three additional cases in which Krauss allegedly sexually harassed people, as documented by one of his colleagues, who wrote on March 10th of 2018:
“After that (Buzzfeed) article appeared, I did some digging on my own, and came up with three cases that have convinced me that Krauss engaged in sexual predation of both a physical nature (groping) and of a verbal nature (offensive and harassing comments). The allegations that convinced me are not public, but the accusers are sufficiently credible that I believe their claims to be true. Further, these claims buttress the general allegation of sexual misbehavior made in BuzzFeed. In my view, then, Krauss had a propensity to engage in sexual misconduct. I therefore disassociate myself from the man.
…
“All I can do, and which I do here, is publicly disassociate myself from Krauss, declare that the behaviors I know of are reprehensible, and hope that he owns up to his behavior.”
The name of the colleague who wrote these strong words? Jerry Coyne. Yep, the man who alleges that trans women are predators who cannot be trusted around vulnerable women, who has contributed an essay to Lawrence Krauss’s new book about a “War on Science,” and who deleted this post rebuking Krauss as a sexual predator and claiming he would disassociate from him.
So. You might be able to see where I’m going with this: Simon and Schuster has decided to allow a man with a rich and detailed history of sexually harassing his young students, colleagues, and fans, and who spent YEARS defending Jeffrey Epstein, the most famous child sex predator on the planet, to publish a collection of essays that include contributions from men who fervently believe that trans women are predators who shouldn’t be allowed to work around vulnerable women.
Wow, they must be right: cancel culture is real. Can’t wait to read their big, published book about it.
