Scientists must not be questioned or challenged by those on the right
[Hat tip: Ace.]
It’s come to this:
A scientific journal article authored by Professor Peter Hotez, a frequent guest on corporate media networks, called to “extend federal hate-crime protections” for scientists facing criticism from alleged “far-right extremists,” including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.
Here’s a link to Hotez’s article so you can read it yourself. A few quotes:
A band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists. In parallel, conservative news outlets repeatedly and purposefully promote disinformation designed to portray key American scientists as enemies. As a consequence, many of us receive threats via email and on social media, while some are stalked at home, to create an unprecedented culture of antiscience intimidation.
Note the use of the word “attacks.” But what he mentions is criticism, disagreement, and some of the cancel culture and doxxing techniques pioneered by the left and only sometimes (and far less frequently) used by the far right. As far as I know, no one has actually been attacked, nor does he allege that anyone has. And if someone is really being stalked there are already laws about that, and remedies.
On the other hand, portraying a scientist as an enemy is perfectly legal. Also, this particular guy certainly does seem to be the enemy of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, by the evidence of the essay. The left says that words are violence and I suppose this guy agrees.
More from Hotez:
Over the spring and summer of 2021, four major incidents stand out. First, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) introduced house bill 2316. The “Fire Fauci Act” called for halting payment of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s salary as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and auditing his digital correspondence and financial transactions. Green’s follow-up press conference on 21 June 2021 included 13 Republican House supporters or co-sponsors, possibly the largest congressional delegation in modern times to single out and attempt to humiliate a prominent American scientist.
Also in June, the Republicans organized a House Select Subcommittee on the origins of COVID-19 with the presumption that it was ignited by gain-of-function genetic engineering research from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Despite evidence pointing to spillover from a viral infection in bats to additional mammals and ultimately humans accounting for previous coronavirus epidemics, the hearings took on a sinister tone, pointing fingers at virologists both in the US and China. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), stated that Dr. Fauci was “afraid of something” and falsely claimed that he was covering up the engineering of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
He seems to think that if his august self says something is a false claim that makes it so. But here he is the one ignoring a host of evidence that contradicts what he’s saying about the possible lab origins of COVID. This form of argument seems – among other things – unworthy of an actual scientist.
There’s much more in his essay. He goes on to overtly discuss politics and makes it clear that he stands firmly in the camp of the Democrats. Hortez makes analogies such as this: “under Stalin, the study of genetics and relativity physics were treated as dangerous western theories, and potentially in conflict with official social philosophies of state.” That’s an interesting analogy, since it is actually he who is the one advocating that no disagreement be allowed with the Approved State Science in the US at this time – the science with which he is allied.
More:
In summary, the aggression against science and scientists in America arises from three sources: 1) Far-right members of the US Congress, 2) the conservative news outlets and 3) a group of thought leaders who provide intellectual underpinnings to fuel the first two elements …
For researchers working in the pandemic response to continue to do so effectively, we seek help in halting the aggression. This is essential not only for our personal safety or national security, but also the reality that attacking science and scientists will both promote illness and cause loss of life.
There it is again – criticism as dangerous aggression that must be stopped, with the pandemic used as an excuse for such suppression. Again, if someone is actually violating a law by death threats and illegal stalking activities, there are already laws that can be activated against that person. But Hotez wants more:
We should look at expanded protection mechanisms for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States. Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY) has introduced a bill known as the Scientific Integrity Act of 2021 (H.R. 849) to protect US Government scientists from political interference, but this needs to be extended for scientists at private research universities and institutes. Still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections.
One of the interesting things about this article, in addition to Hotez’s anti-free-speech tendencies, is his idea that anti-science and anti-vax sentiment comes only from the right, which it certainly does not.
And what hate crimes is he talking about? Perhaps he’s thinking of laws in Canada and Europe that criminalize hate speech? Such laws don’t exist in the US – yet. Hate crimes in the US must involve an actual crime other than mere speech.
He closes with this (again with the “aggression”):
We must take steps to protect our scientists and take swift and positive action to counter the growing wave of far-right antiscience aggression. Not taking action is a tacit endorsement, and a guarantee that the integrity and productivity of science in the United States will be eroded or lose ground.
I would say the integrity and productivity of science in the US has already lost ground – particularly its integrity, in part due to thinking such as Hotez’s. And here I once thought that scientists welcomed discussion, criticism, and dissent, and relished the opportunity to prove their cases with facts and logic. I guess I’m behind the times.
I looked this man up on the interweb and if I were casting a ‘Mad’ Scientist for a real bad sitcom with canned laughter he would be perfect. He is Ivy league undergrad and medical degree total NE part of the USA and I wonder how the heck he ended up in Houston at Baylor yet there he is. His article is just an off the wall rant against conservatives and those who are not on board with his more scientific enlightened views, in his opinion might need to go to a special camp for special training. What an ass.
“Not taking action is a tacit endorsement,”
Unless you say the words I want to hear-and demonstrate to me that you really mean it, you are a criminal.
Every trial lawyer knows, you can get an expert on both sides of any question.
Hotez is a textbook case of psychological projection; he must have had a tough time with his psychiatry clerkship in med school.
Another demagogue wearing the protective cover labeled ‘credentialed scientist’.
Many years ago, I read a scifi novel that related how the public had engaged in mob assaults by fanatical religionists on the scientists of that time. I thought it an appalling development. Now, absent the religious aspect, it seems quite understandable.
Along with ‘journalists’ spewing propaganda, academia training ‘teachers’ to enforce indoctrination, doctors in leadership positions of official importance in effect supporting murder, CEOs enforcing groupthink and mandatory participation in a mass medical experiment, politicians doing their best to destroy America along with a military leadership engaged in treason… ‘scientists’ are simply doing their ‘civic’ duty.
Hotez simply articulates in plain terms the mentality of the faculty subculture in this country. He will be critiqued by no one who is not already an established dissident.
“Every trial lawyer knows, you can get an expert on both sides of any question.” Cornhead
There can often be an honest difference of expert opinion. That said, when one expert ignores valid points made by another expert, it’s no longer an honest difference of opinion, instead one expert is being paid to lie.
No consequence for lying… no deterrence, indeed it rewards lying.
Some years ago On Facebook, a Democrat friend of a friend bragged about how he was one of the scientist who “ peer reviewed” some particular Climate Change model. So I started asking questions about how that climate change model accounted for feed back loops such as changing climate causing vegetation to grow faster in some places and how the model accounted for the urban heat island effect.
Fortunately the fellow was mainly exasperated and insisted that changing vegetation growth rates was not part of any feed back loop, positive or negative. He never provided any explanation for how the model would account for that. But hey, he “ peer reviewed it.”
Must be about how all those “ scientist” said mass gatherings for BLM protest were ok.
A few years from now I might have been off to the reeducation camps for questioning a “ scientist.”
“In summary, the aggression against science and scientists in America arises from three sources: 1) Far-right members of the US Congress, 2) the conservative news outlets and 3) a group of thought leaders who provide intellectual underpinnings to fuel the first two elements …”
Shades of “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” return once more.
Hotez is a petty authoritarian puffed up on his TV celebrity. A junior version of Anthony Fauci.
Richard Feynman would just laugh.
I saw a Stalinist connection, too. Trofim Lysenko.
https://theotherclub.org/2021/08/channeling-trofim-lysenko.html
This woman is a scientist and this is a nice little talk about PCR tests and how they are being used in a way they have never been used before. Over testing has been one of the biggest drivers of the panic because it creates ‘cases, cases, cases’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loQd2rC8mjg
Last night Zaphod and I had an interesting volley in the Delta topic*, which started from my claim that in recent years the virologist, Luc Montagnier, had become … unsound. Much like that wonderful, early scene about Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” (GD Spradlin is so great!)
–“Apocalypse Now”, “His ideas, methods, became unsound.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lKHIL1eSVU
Geoffrey Britain asked on what authority could one make that determination. I replied, “Nullius in verba” — “Take no one’s word.”
Zaphod responded, in essence, that in our vastly complex society no one has the time to do so.
Zaphod was correct and I agreed, but noted that even though ordinary citizens lack the time and expertise to dispute with scientists, nonetheless we may be required to do so, as in the case of climate change.
It seems clear that scientists may be herded and politicized as easily as any other human group, however, much we (or at least I) would like to believe otherwise.
Scientists can be coerced by real pressures or peer pressures to believe or at least publicly claim that “2+2=5” with regard to climate change or more obviously the transgender dogma on the sexes.
I am so disappointed.
_________________________
* Delta topic: https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/08/04/children-and-the-delta-variant/
It’s the tired “I’m smart and your dumb” game because “I have a PhD/MD” while “you’re a hick/conservative/redneck” who “doesn’t believe in Science, Inclusivity and Diversity.” The neck is elitism whose face is classism.
@GRA:
And the Achilles Heel is the demise of Classicism and with it truly educated (as opposed to merely credentialed) elites over the last century and the resulting ever-building wave of hubris which will… well I won’t over-egg the pudding any more.
Another very important thing is the suppression of the use of Hydroxychloroquine and of Ivormectin. These treatments have been found very effective in other countries, but their use is forbidden, here. We shall probably never know how many lives were needlessly lost because the practitioners of political medicine did not want there to be a cure until the bad orange man had been driven from the White House.
We have in our little proprietary trading racket two quant guys who came up through computational biology and did their post-docs at the Harvard School of Public Health — both near geniuses from the smarter side of the Gefilte Fish Line and one with sufficient pedigree to have married into a particularly celebrated lineage. So no fools… wicked sharp really.. and pretty much to the manner born when it comes to early C21 manners, mores, and the arts of getting ahead, doing kick-ass TED Talks and grant-writing.
These guys — one of whom is a trustafarian married to a trustafarian and therefore free from any need to work for a living, both of them socially connected as %#^ and capable of navigating the nepotistic world of high academe with a wink a and a nod… both to their great credit quit in disgust and signed up with our crew to work in a far more intellectually-free environment where they can actually get real work done and put their big brains through the paces rather than playing politics all day.
And we’re C or D-List Algorithmic Bottom Feeders in the Money Game. Hedge Funds are full of guys like this who have quit the Ivies after the PhDs or post docs in disgust. Sometimes they just develop a love of money, fast cars, and women… but mostly it’s disgust for what has happened to Academe. It’s a mess out there. The Replication Crisis is very real.
Regarding wider epistemological breakdowns in late stage Western Civ… one thing big Hedge Funds do is produce their own statistics and do sentiment analysis on literally everything. Can’t trust official sources, media, academe.
Michael Adams, I thought once the Orange Man was gone to Florida they’d suddenly discover that HCQ and/or ivermectin help, but they haven’t. I think this is a case of “follow the money.” Big, big money in the new vaccines and in therapeutics being developed (slowly), but no big money in cheap generics. I think the possibility of saving 24% to maybe 85% of the lives would be worth using the cheap treatments, but no, Big Money wants new things, and to heck with the lives lost.
I don’t think undergraduates understand this anymore, but a hate crime is supposed to be a crime motivated by “hate”. Hate and extremism are still legal in the USA.
According to this fool, prosecuting Dr Mengale would have been a hate crime.
I’m a genuine scientist.
I’ll pass on hate crime (a type of law that shouldn’t exist) protection, thank you.
Well, well, well – my Congressman is cited in a post as having produced a piece of legislation! Astounding. I had begun to wonder how the heck he was earning his keep.
So, ‘Science is the culture of doubt’ became ‘The Science Is Settled!’, and has now progressed to include persecution of all those who dare to voice doubt, or even worse, disagreement with ‘The Science!’. If this trend keeps up, pretty soon ‘Science’ will be in Witness Protection.
Note that the link on the second line of your post (“It’s come to this:”) was corrupted and should be:
https://thenationalpulse.com/news/paper-calls-for-fauci-criticism-to-be-a-hate-crime/
– – – – – –
Clearly, Hotez is bad news. Toxic. Probably a psychopath.
And not the brightest light in the room (he attacked Sharyl Attkisson—never a good idea—and lost her defamation suit against him):
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/06/read-dr-peter-hotez-defamation/
There’s also this (which seems to be related to your original link):
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-05-06-nature-publishes-insane-rant-by-texas-pediatrician-peter-hotez.html
Just finish up by saying that the author of the following article…
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/05/johns-hopkins-professor-says-covid-infection-provides-more-immunity-than-vaccines/
…will no doubt end up in the Good Doctor’s Gulag—that is, if this fascist continues to be allowed to spread his poisons far and wide…which he no doubt will be, since he’s spewing precisely those threats that the mandarins in charge of this medical, ethical AND national fiasco want everyone to hear, internalize and cower from….
Absolutely disgusting—but Hotez is the Fauci’s pit bull and the pustulant face of the “Biden” COVID policy.
So if there’s a Doctors’ Plot, where’s Beria when we need him? Probably addicted to porn in his Mom’s Basement. O tempora, o mores!
Or in keeping with the OT meander off into Japanology in the other thread:
O Tempura! O Morays!
Err… I’ll get my coat..
Zaphod:
O tempura! O morays!
Here’s the thing – Hotez isn’t a “scientist”. By simple virtue of writing this, he is outing himself as nothing but a pure, partisan political activist. Similarly, Fauci is certainly not a “scientist”. He’s a career government bureaucrat.
These people are pathological in their delusions.
I’d love, love, LOVE to see a multiple page expose on the details of “In summary, the aggression against science and scientists in America arises from three sources: 1) Far-right members of the US Congress, 2) the conservative news outlets and 3) a group of thought leaders who provide intellectual underpinnings to fuel the first two elements”
Who, precisely are these “tHoUgHt LeAdErS” – and exactly how many viewers / page clicks do their terribly non-intellectual edicts actually get ? Same question for these alleged “far right members of Congress. I mean, I know who MTG is, but honestly, how many people does she actually reach, let alone “influence” ?
Maybe include a compare and contrast methodology to the actual size of the viewership and reach of the handful of “conservative news outlets” as opposed to the liberal mainstream media.
Because I gotta tell you, the idea that Fox and OANN and MTG are secretly being guided by un-named “tHoUgHt LeAdErS” in hilariously detached from reality.
I don’t know who is being “threatened” with “aggression”, or by whom, but I feel pretty confident it doesn’t exist.
Saying Fauci needs to be fired is protected first amendment speech AND petitioning the government for redress of grievances. And was justified when he screwed up the AIDS response 30+ years ago.
What a bunch of nonsense.
Geoffrey Britain. Canticle for Leibowitz?
At some point, prior to Covid, scientists got a kind of promotion. Instead of odd guys sweating away in basement labs, they were above us, issuing lots of neat things.
Problem is….most of the neat things were from entrepreneurs–see the big tech–or engineers or tinkerers–telephone, etc. The exception was, I suppose, medicine, where it was direct from lab to pharmacy and you got better faster.
Science was in the background, principles or actual objects used by the developers.
But now, the are above us, lords of all they survey and not to be doubted.
Guy named Bargh did some psych work and wrote “Before You Know It”. I read it, emailed him some observations where I thought he might not have been correct. Should have checked the dates. His work had fallen off the table before I added pepper to the wound. Replication sucked. But the library still has the book. But we are to believe these folks never get it wrong.
Wrt ivermectin and HCQ: If effective therapies are available, the emergency use authorization is no longer valid.
@neo:
Brava!
Barry Meislin:
Fixed the link. Thanks.
I just hope that eel is cooked…er, well cooked….
@Barry Meislin:
“I just hope that eel is cooked…er, well cooked…”
Been trying my hardest to get my goose cooked in these parts to no avail!
The Real Deal River Eel in Japan is a getting to be expensive delicacy grilled over charcoal and traditionally supposedly to be just what the doctor ordered to keep one’s marital ardor on point during the hot, humid, enervating summer months.
I was once treated to an outing to an Unagi restaurant in Sapporo by some very dry-witted and droll just passably inscrutable potential in-laws. Didn’t quite pan out in the end. I guess should have ordered seconds.
Not easy to come by outside Japan. Most of the Unagi on sale elsewhere is intensively farmed in China and just seems a bit too oily and smelly in comparison with the Japan domestic product.
Also there’s this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_England#Death
@ Geoffrey Britain
Oh, to be sure, progressivism is definitely a “religion”
@Richard Aubrey —
At some point, prior to Covid, scientists got a kind of promotion.
I think you can blame the ’50s, when Science! was going to win the Cold War and Cure Disease and Feed the World and yadda yadda yadda. Eggheads in white coats in movies and on tv. They may have been a little weird, but they were going to save the world.
Wrt ivermectin and HCQ: If effective therapies are available, the emergency use authorization is no longer valid.
I keep reading this, but it makes no sense to me. In an era when election laws, immigration laws, and the very Constitution can just be “waived” due to “emergency”, why couldn’t this provision be waived at the stroke of a pen as well?
@Bryan Lovely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
The Boffin Barbarians won out completely in the end and here we are.
Hadn’t occurred to me before, but of course C P Snow prompted this from Flanders and Swann:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnbiVw_1FNs
And they mention him in the intro.
The last time I heard this as a young teenager, the finer philosophical point was All Greek to Me. Swooshed right over my head. Happier times.
Also… Miscegenators Beware:
Flanders and Swann: Misalliance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYr0eNtpDHs
Clearly, Hotez is bad news. Toxic. Probably a psychopath.
He says the quiet part out loud. I’m going to wager if you carefully question faculty and administrators, you’ll discover his views are bog standard in that subculture. It’s just that he isn’t neurotypical so doesn’t know how to be evasive.
“As a consequence”
Does he present data to support this hypothesis? Scrubbed data? Filtered? Raw data? All the ETL and SQL and SAS or R code that provides the conclusion?
Show your work.
“Who let the nerd in?”
Bryan. If the emergency use authorization is waived, the vaxxing no longer is “okay’ as it lacks FDA approval.
So–hate to do conspiracy theorizing here–if safe, effective, out-of-patent therapeutics are available, the EUA disappears and everybody gets better on the cheap if they happen to get the ‘rona in the first place.
Flat earth scientism. Here at last, free at last from fb twitter censorship.
Bryant. I recall a description of pop fiction of the time. “Doc” was a scientist and the love interest was his daughter. Our hero rescued both of them or something. Lots of that happening, so it would appear “Doc” was supposed to be a Good Guy.
However, decades ago, helping my daughter on a high school paper, I got to the county library and on a whim looked up Life magazines of the Fifties. Sure as I recalled, every fourth issue (it was a weekly) was a puff piece on our military. There was The Big Picture, an Army pub half hour show on various non-network channels.
We were being fed the military’s value by many means.
But, I would submit, the actual tech stars were engineers who made the stuff. Not the theoreticians trying to figure stuff out.
Anybody who can pull a spark plug thinks he can follow how to finesse a widget. Scientists were among the absent-minded professors from whose labs stuff would occasionally emerge.
Then they became veritable gods, credible on every subject. That was pre-Covid and was my point.
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Bryan. If the emergency use authorization is waived, the vaxxing no longer is “okay’ as it lacks FDA approval.
No, I mean waive the bit that says there can’t be an alternative effective therapeutic. “Belt and suspenders!” the politicians could say. “Why not both?!”
(For that matter, the FDA’s rule that New Thing must do the job better than Existing Thing to get approved never made any sense to me. Why not have New Thing available in case Existing Thing doesn’t work for reasons not contemplated in the testing?)
Bryan. Far as I know, the alternatives are not strictly forbidden> But there is reportedly pressure from various hierarchies–medical as well as political–not to use it.
When bad Orangeman was POTUS, some governors threatened to pull the licenses of doctors who used it. Not so much any more.
I unfortunately know a great number of liberals, living behind the lines as I do. One trait most share is total lack of respect for differing opinions. Their response to hearing a differing opinion is that they are being “attacked”. It’s almost like there are no objective facts, just differing opinions, so needless to say, their opinions in effect are themselves, to be guarded jealously.