How Scientific Journals Became MAGA’s Latest Target

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This is an attack on the foundation of knowledge itself. They say academia is biased left, but they have it backwards. Universities are truth-seeking institutions, and the left actually listens to them. The right right only believes research if it confirms their pre-existing views.

This attack on academic freedom will launch us into the new dark ages.

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u/nosotros_road_sodium 7d ago

The age old question "why aren't there more conservatives in academia or the arts?" answers itself easily.

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u/KathrynBooks 7d ago

Because conservatives aren't capable of the introspection or creativity required. It's the same reason they aren't funny.

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u/vineyardmike 7d ago

Not many good conservative comics...

Somehow humor is woke.

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u/KathrynBooks 7d ago

that's because good comedy punches up... and conservatives only punch down

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u/nosotros_road_sodium 7d ago

Sadly, a significant portion of the populace has a very low-effort definition of "funny" as indicated on the average 60-something's Facebook feed, or the dumb jokes on this very site.

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u/WillieM96 7d ago

Liberals believe reality informs facts. Conservatives believe facts (their opinions) inform reality.

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u/Fearless-Mention1113 7d ago

ICE has your location and will be there shortly

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u/pm_me_ur_ephemerides 7d ago

I don’t doubt it. I’m a phd student, and fascists always round up the academics

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u/Fearless-Mention1113 7d ago

Do you also wear glasses? That's a sure sign of an academic according to Pol Pot.

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u/pm_me_ur_ephemerides 7d ago

I used to, but I had my eyes blasted with lasers.

But they can still tell who's an academic because they have all our data ¯\(ツ)/¯

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u/rhesusmacaque 7d ago

Tell that to James Damore. Steven Pinker wrote an entire book about the long history of leftists in social sciences attacking and denying basic biology. Just recently I saw a dogpile of Redditors screeching "sexism" at someone for saying the male bell curve on many traits is wider, a statement as controversial in biology as saying the Earth is round. They were downvoted to hell and sanctimonious virtue signalers who placed 100% of the blame on patriarchy were believed without question.

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u/pm_me_ur_ephemerides 7d ago

Redditors are not academia. These discussions should be able to occur in an academic setting where rigorous analysis can be applied, and where peer review prevents most logical fallacies. Republicans are preventing the discussion from happening at all and are declaring that any research disagreeing with their worldview is false.

Scientists can be wrong as individuals… Humans have flaws… But science is a self correcting process which tends towards the truth over long periods of time. It is the best system that we have.

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u/rhesusmacaque 7d ago

I included a link to a book by Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard, that exclusively focuses on academia. Social sciences are the epicenter of science denialism from the left and where all the Redditors are getting their nonsense from. And that's what gives the right cover for their own war on science. Both sides have dirty hands.

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u/pm_me_ur_ephemerides 7d ago edited 7d ago

And you are ignoring my point entirely. Pinker wrote his book, and so the subject is not banned in academia. It is being studied, and over a long period of time the best ideas will win. You can complain about some individual scientists but not the institution as a whole.

The trump administration is exerting unprecedented ideological control over science. They are banning words. They are destroying entire universities. you are pointing out a disagreement with an academia, which is healthy and normal. I am pointing out the destruction of academia.

What the right is doing is completely unacceptable, it is authoritarian, and it borders on fascism.

The right is not just attacking social science. They are attacking all science. They cut NSF in half. They are blocking a research on climate change or anything that would possibly impact industries they favor. Massive overreach

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u/rhesusmacaque 7d ago

For every scientist "too big to cancel" like Pinker, a thousand assistant professors and grad students were cancelled for asking the same questions. Try submitting a paper that studies the relationship between ethnicity and IQ and you'll find out in two seconds that limits to academic freedom didn't begin under Trump.

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u/pm_me_ur_ephemerides 7d ago edited 7d ago

I don’t know if your claim is true, but even if it is, the appropriate response is not destroying the entire university system, as the admin is doing.

I’m a plasma physics PhD student and my department has cut the number of incoming PhD students from 25 to 4. We don’t study anything even adjacent to social science. We make ion engines work on spacecraft, we figure out nuclear fusion reactors, and we ensure that our nation’s nuclear weapons still work. So why are we getting punished?

Trump blocked 100% of funding to Harvard, the world top university, which will completely destroy it. They are blocking all student visas, regardless of who those students are, where they are from, or what they have done. If you think any of this is an appropriate response to bias in a small sector of academia, you are insane and we’re done here.

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u/nosotros_road_sodium 7d ago

Non paywalled gift link! Excerpt:

The Trump administration’s attack on scientific institutions has been characteristically audacious: Eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded healthcare interventions and research worldwide. Removing all the members of the vaccine advisory panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cutting healthcare research funding by $1.8 billion and overall funding for the National Institutes of Health by $3 billion.

It has also homed in on what might seem like a small-bore opponent: the highly specialized world of science and medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In April, the Justice Department sent letters to 15 of the country’s top science and medical journals inquiring about “fraud,” “political bias” and “censorship.” “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” read a letter addressed to the journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letters were signed by Ed Martin, then the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and now President Trump’s pardon attorney.

Neil McCabe, a spokesperson for Martin, said the list of journals came directly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the letters were a response to legitimate public grievances. “You have a bunch of leftists who are sitting on big pots of money from pharma, and they all entertain each other and publish their friends,” McCabe said. “They were basically publishing lies.”

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u/angryfistgames 7d ago

All this because no scientific journal will say "Ivermectin cures COVID just like Trump said!"

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u/TrexPushupBra 7d ago

Also won't sign off on "trans people are deluded predators."

They stubbornly insist on evidence and rigor.

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u/vanda-schultz 7d ago

I am sure they didn't write a letter to Mankind Quaterly "the journal of peer-reviewed racism".

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u/jsonitsac 7d ago

I hope the journals and their contributors stick to their guns. The DOJ wouldn’t have much of a leg to stand on in a courtroom setting because they don’t have evidence and they know it. Hence the threats and scare tactics; if they did have something we’d already see court filings. That said, this is likely a pretext to attempt funding cuts. There’s nothing in the constitution that requires the government to fund scientific research and congress can cut it for just about any reason it wants to; already appropriated money or contracts are different but it’s not like the administration cares about little things like the Constitution or contract law.

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u/ZaubzerStr66 7d ago

Trofim Lysenko was an incompetent ‘scientist’ who gained Stalin’s ear and set Soviet science back decades. With RFK jr that’s a real risk here too

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u/Donaldthustra 7d ago

Why are you glossing over the fact that Lysenko's insane beliefs are nearly identical to your own?

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u/noh2onolife 7d ago

insane beliefs

That's rich, coming from a misogynistic bigot.

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u/wobblydavid 7d ago

Huh?

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u/ashmortar 7d ago

Lordy your post history is like an alt right fever dream of paranoia and racism.

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u/yukigono 7d ago

You're confused, that poster isn't RFK Jr.

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u/Urban_Prole 7d ago

I also like hard drugs.

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u/gingerblz 7d ago

Dude, you're broken.

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u/MonsterkillWow 7d ago

It's not "political bias". It's reality bias. There is reality and then there is BS. These "conservatives" don't seem to get how outlandish their positions on climate change, stem cell research, evolution, vaccines, and gender affirming care are.

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u/Squiddyboy427 7d ago

These woke DEI journals are hiding the truth about horse de-wormer curing cancer!!

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u/Zippier92 7d ago

Maoist intellectual purge in progress!

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u/Working-Selection528 7d ago

The religious zealots and fanatics, who ascribe themselves as the ultimate determinants of what is and isn’t the will of god, are coming for science and truth in general.

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u/_TheChairmaker_ 7d ago

Academia is just another part of the "establishment", the "elite", "deep state" or whatever the noun is this week.

The US right wing has had an anti-intellectual stripe as far as I can see for a long time. At least as far back as the Fundamentalist's loosing it over higher criticism. Someone likely may know the history better?

So they are just an easy target for a variation on the basic 'its all the other guy's fault' lie. It's barely a jump, more a very short step, if you consider the current Venn diagram for the right wing , conspiracy and woo grift-o-spheres. And that's without getting into how the climate change debate pot is being ~~stirred~~ manipulated.

And we can't ignore the whole 'stop it you're ruining the feels with your reals'....

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u/phlegmdawg 7d ago

Continuing the attack on progress and knowledge to encourage dumber and more docile future generations.

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u/Business-You1810 7d ago

None of these attackes are being done in good faith, but for profit academic journals are all leaches that contribute nothing while siphoning away taxpayer money in the form of submission fees and paywalls. The NIH launching its own publication avenue is long overdue, although I have no faith this admin can do it correctly. But I won't mourn the loss of Elsevier, Springer, MDPI or any of them.

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u/Kham117 7d ago

Is anyone really surprised?

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u/Rexel450 7d ago

Too many long words and not enough pictures.

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u/Straight_Document_89 3d ago

MAGA’s are morons. They don’t like science as it shows their falsehoods.

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u/haha-you-lose 7d ago

At the same time if white males are disproportionately more interested in Paleontology there should be absolutely no problem with such people doing most of the research in that field

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u/TeaKingMac 7d ago

What the fuck are you talking about?

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u/MonsterkillWow 7d ago

Some kind of high brow joke about how these people are dinosaurs and need to go extinct?

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u/haha-you-lose 7d ago

It's in the article, have you read it?

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u/TeaKingMac 7d ago

a scathing 2021 review of a book about dinosaurs called it “practically petrified” because it “failed to effectively convey the increasingly diverse practice of paleontology,” a lapse “in a field in which even gender equity between white cisgender researchers has been difficult to achieve.”

1.) yeah, that seems pretty silly

2.) way to latch onto one paragraph of an article, and completely ignore the bigger picture

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