The Politicization of Science Sinks to New Depths for Kamala Harris

T he magazine Scientific American has been in continuous publication since 1845, featuring great minds such as Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer in its pages, but its proud history has been recently marred by its publication of unscientific drivel. Now, by taking an explicit position on the 2024 presidential election, Scientific American directly — and ridiculously — equates science with leftism.

“In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures,” the magazine’s editorial board writes. “In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience.”

Moreover, “Harris was vice president of an administration that boosted widespread distribution of COVID vaccines and created a program for free mail-order COVID tests,” the editors write, flat-out ignoring that Harris initially rejected the Covid vaccine when it was associated with Donald Trump’s administration. Scientific American also endorsed Joe Biden, in 2020, after the current president had expressly stated that Trump had rushed the development vaccine and that it was “not likely to go through all the tests that need to be done, and the trials that are needed to be done.” In other words, Scientific American‘s own top-line justification for endorsing Harris and Biden is factually incorrect. The magazine’s remaining justifications for its endorsement are that Harris favors abortion, gun confiscation, and environmentalist policies — which is to assume that left-wing positions are somehow by default scientific.

As I’ve noted before, pretending that political hacks are unbiased scientists isn’t scientific . . . or American. Such endorsements do not move the political needle one centimeter and simply make people much less likely to “trust the science” on issues such as vaccines and health advisories, as demonstrated by Scientific American’s and Nature’s 2020 endorsement of Biden. Floyd Jiuyun Zhang, a researcher from Stanford University, who studied the electoral effect of these endorsements, wrote in an article in Nature Behavior:

In a preregistered large-sample controlled experiment, I randomly assigned participants to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant.

It took Scientific American almost 200 years of dedicated effort to build its reputation and credibility, only to liquidate it for a statistically insignificant bump for a favored candidate in an election. The most generous interpretation of the decision would be that the magazine’s replacement of science with activism was an attempt at clickbait-y audience capture, but even that likely hasn’t panned out.

As public trust in corporate media consistently declines, America desperately needs reputable sources of scientific information that avoid the temptations Scientific American has fallen to. Such journals are so busy pushing a political agenda and left-wing activist talking points that they have hardly any time for science anymore. A filmmaker writing in Scientific American claimed in 2022, for example, in an article promoting a film by the Intersex Society of North America, that men invented the concept of womanhood in the 18th century in order to oppress half the human race. That this writer’s timing was off by a factor of over 100 isn’t surprising given that the source cited in the article was a survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank, which was previously led by former White House chief of staff and 2016 Hillary Clinton–campaign chairman John Podesta.

Scientific American has repeatedly provided cover for far-left positions that range from defunding the police and supporting affirmative action to criticizing Dungeons and Dragons as racist and laying out “the case for antiracism.” Some articles in the magazine have even denounced clearly beneficial public-health goals, such as reducing America’s sky-high obesity rate, as racist. Not to be outdone, leading science journal Nature infamously stated in 2022 that it would refuse to publish any scientific evidence or arguments incompatible with far-left ideology. The outright rejection of disfavored ideas defeats the entire purpose of science.

And this has had a huge effect on public confidence. Until 2018, polling had found a relatively small, ten-point partisan divide among Americans who said they had “a great deal” of confidence in the scientific community. By 2022, that trust gap had widened to 31 points. In the intervening years, and especially during the pandemic, science had become obviously partisan. Consider, for example, attempts by major scientific journals to use laughably bad methodology to calculate the “cost of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic” — cost, of course, that was blamed on Donald Trump. Even left-leaning scientists, such as Michael Shermer, have lamented Scientific American’s and Nature’s yearslong descent into the swamp of dubious political ideology and scholarly irrelevance. Scientific publications are now long on opinion but short on science. Leftism’s long march through our research institutions is far from over.

The fiscal costs, too, are very real. The taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation openly admits that it has spent $270 million to promote critical race theory in science, technology, engineering, and math — under the direction of such individuals who are liable to compare school choice to chattel slavery. To take one example, the NSF gave over $4 million to Columbia University specifically to “decolonize geoscience.” This isn’t science.

What can be done about this problem? Most universities are largely funded by government grants or direct transfers from taxpayers to state schools. And the budgets of these universities are soaring in part to cover administrative expenses required to comply with an ever increasing number of regulations designed to make colleges even more expressly left-wing. In the 23 deep-red states where Republicans control every branch of state government, they could sharply limit this kind of spending fairly easily. And conservatives, roughly half of the voting public, can ensure that their representatives do so.

The real danger to scientific progress isn’t free inquiry; it is the sanitization of science and of the canon of human knowledge in the name of political expedience, which turns scholarship into little more than a scheme to launder taxpayer dollars for advocacy.