Latest news with #GreatAwokening
Spectator
2 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
How political ideology corrupted science
Science is no longer regarded or respected as an objective pursuit, one in which the principle of impartiality is sought with due diligence. This is the inference we can make from comments made by Ella Al-Shamahi, presenter of the new BBC science series, Human. 'We do have to be a little honest,' she says, 'to many, it seems like left-leaning atheists have a monopoly on science.' Science as presented to the public has taken a decidedly left-wing turn in recent years, and in many cases has been contaminated by hyper-liberal ideology Her remarks, reported in the Sunday Times, echo those made earlier this month by the Wellcome Trust chief executive, John-Arne Røttingen, who said that scientists now had a 'responsibility' to demonstrate why research from across the political spectrum matters, in light of the fact that the 'research community overall is more on the progressive/left-wing side.' Al-Shami's words are a rare admission of a well-known development. They confirm what many have come to recognise: science as presented to the public has taken a decidedly left-wing turn in recent years, and in many cases has been contaminated by hyper-liberal ideology. This became evident to many after the death of the biologist, entomologist and polymath E.O. Wilson in December 2021, when Scientific American published a scolding obituary of this titan of our times. 'With the death of biologist E.O. Wilson on Sunday, I find myself again reflecting on the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas', began the article. It damned his 'problematic' work and legacy, chiefly because his 1975 masterpiece, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, suggested that human societies in many ways reflect innate human characteristics. While this notion has always been largely objectionable to the traditional left, it is utterly intolerable to modern-day hyper-liberals. Scientific American was one of the greatest casualties of the Great Awokening of ten years ago. It abandoned all pretence at impartiality last September by endorsing Kamala Harris to be US president, having previously jettisoned most claims to seriousness in 2021, when it published an article urging readers to reject the Jedi religion, based on the Star Wars franchise, on the basis that this quasi-faith was 'prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution.' That article was merely an egregious warning that a global scientific establishment had become captured and compromised. A far more serious symptom of this development was how health institutions worldwide came to accept and then propagate the non-scientific, non-empirical trans ideology of 'gender self-identification'. While the NHS today still states that, 'Gender identity is a way to describe a person's innate sense of their own gender', the World Health Organisation's guidelines parrot the same subjective mantra: 'Gender identity refers to a person's deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender'. In 2023 John Hopkins University took trans ideology to its ultimate, absurd yet inevitable conclusion, when in releasing a new glossary of terms for clinicians and the general public, it defined a lesbian as 'a non-man attracted to non-men'. The corruption of scientific discourse and public instruction when it comes to the fact that human beings are divided into two sexes is one of the alarming signs of a global scientific and academic community that has become degraded by politics. The profusion and contamination of wokery, with its other obsessions of race and hurtful words, has been equally as conspicuous. In 2017 Professor Rochelle Gutierrez from the University of Illinois made the claim that 'on many levels, mathematics operates as whiteness.' In 2020 the Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry produced new guidelines to 'minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content'. This language shows how postmodernist relativism has spread into the scientific field – the very last place it deserves to belong. It's something Richard Dawkins has long-been attuned to and exasperated by, having written in River Out of Eden of those who insisted that science was merely a Western origin myth: 'Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.' One of Dawkins's most recent interventions has been against attempts to include Maori 'ways of knowing' into science classes in New Zealand. Science can't but help be influenced by the politics of its time. It's why 'scientific racism' flourished in the 19th century. It's why a previous generation of deranged leftists, those in charge of the Soviet Union, denied the mainstream theory of evolution, becoming beholden instead to the Lamarckian delusion that organisms could pass to their offspring traits acquired in their own lifetimes. Even if science can never attain a purely God-like perspective on the world, we should always strive for objectivity. Examples from history should remind us to forever be on guard against our own unconscious bias.
Vox
13-06-2025
- Business
- Vox
What drove the tech right's — and Elon Musk's — big, failed bet on Trump
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. While tech has generally been very liberal in its political support and giving, there's been an emergence of a real and influential tech right over the last few years. Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I don't know anyone who says they voted for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020. I know, on the other hand, quite a few who voted for him in 2024, and quite a few more who — while they didn't vote for Trump because of his many crippling personal foibles, corruption, penchant for destroying the global economy, etc. — have thoroughly soured on the Democratic Party. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It's not just my professional networks. While tech has generally been very liberal in its political support and giving, the last few years have seen the emergence of a real and influential tech right. Elon Musk, of course, is by far the most famous, but he didn't start the tech right by himself. And while his break with Trump — which Musk now seems to be backpedaling on — might have changed his role within the tech right, I don't think this shift will end with him. The rise of the tech right The Bay Area tech scene has always to my mind been best understood as left-libertarian — socially liberal, but suspicious of big government and excited about new things from cryptocurrency to charter cities to mosquito gene drives to genetically engineered superbabies to tooth bacteria. That array of attitudes sometimes puts them at odds with governments (and much of the public, which tends to be much less welcoming of new technology). The tech world valorizes founders and doers, and everyone knows two or three stories about a company that only succeeded because it was willing to break some city regulations. Lots of founders are immigrants; lots are LGBTQ+. For a long time, this set of commitments put tech firmly on the political left — and indeed tech employees overwhelmingly vote and donate to the Democratic Party. Related The AI that apparently wants Elon Musk to die But over the last 10 years, I think three things changed. The first was what Vox at the time called the Great Awokening — a sweeping adoption of what had been a bunch of niche liberal social justice ideas, from widespread acceptance of trans people to suspicion of any sex or race disparity in hiring to #MeToo awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. A lot of this shift at tech companies was employee driven; again, tech employees are mostly on the left. And some of it was good! But some of it was illiberal — rejecting the idea that we can and should work with people we profoundly disagree with — and identitarian, in that it focused more on what demographic categories we belong to than our commonalities. We're now in the middle of a backlash, which I think is all the more intense in tech because the original woke movement was all the more intense in tech. The second thing that changed was the macroeconomic environment. When I first joined a tech company in 2017, interest rates were low and VC funding was incredibly easy to get. Startups were everywhere, and companies were desperately competing to hire employees. As a result, employees had a lot of power; CEOs were often scared of them. The third was a deliberate effort by many liberals to go after a tech scene they saw as their enemy. The Biden administration ended up staffed by a lot of people ideologically committed to Sen. Elizabeth Warren's view of the world, where big tech was the enemy of liberal democracy and the tools of antitrust should be used to break it up. Lina Khan's Federal Trade Commission acted on those convictions, going after big tech companies like Amazon. Whether you think this was the right call in economic terms — I mostly think it was not — it was decidedly self-destructive in political terms. So in 2024, some of tech (still not a majority, but a smaller minority than in the past two Trump elections) went right. The tech world watched with bated breath as Musk announced DOGE: Would the administration bring about the deregulation, tax cuts, and anti-woke wish list they believed that only the administration could? …and the immediate failure The answer so far has been no. (Many people on the tech right are still more optimistic than me, and point at a small handful of victories, but my assessment is that they're wearing rose-colored glasses to the point of outright blindness.) Some deregulation has happened, but any beneficial effects it would have had on investment have been more than canceled out by the tariffs' catastrophic effects on businesses' ability to plan for the future. They did at least get the tax cuts for the rich, if the 'big, beautiful bill' passes, but that's about all they got — and the ultra-rich will be poorer this year anyway thanks to the unsteady stock market. The Republicans, when out of power, had a critique of the Democrats which spoke to the tech right, the populist right, the white supremacists and moderate Black and Latino voters alike. But it's much easier to complain about Democrats in a way that all of those disparate interest groups find compelling than to govern in a way that keeps them all happy. Once the Trump administration actually had to choose, it chose basically none of the tech right's priorities. They took a bad bet — and I think it'd behoove the Democrats to think, as Trump's coalition fractures, about which of those voters can be won back.
New York Times
03-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
Trump's ‘Nihilistic' Crusade Against Harvard Is About Much More Than Harvard
Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, is not a left-wing academic. He is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and the editor-at-large of Compact, a heterodox online magazine that leans to the right. In the case of Trump v. Harvard, Conti believes that the university, 'is close to being an appendage of the Democratic Party.' Harvard and units within it, Conti wrote in Compact, have issued numerous public statements during the Great Awokening that aligned the organization with left-wing causes (a practice which Harvard has since ended). Self-censorship is generally prevalent on campuses across the nation, but is much higher among conservatives, who rightly sense that the university is largely hostile to their views. Despite Conti's indisputably conservative credentials, he has come to believe that the Trump administration's approach to higher education — and toward Harvard in particular — not only violates due process but threatens to destroy the reputation of the United States as an international center of learning. 'It now looks like the administration has decided,' Conti wrote in a more recent essay in Compact, 'A Dangerous Turn in Trump's War on Universities,' 'that it will simply bludgeon Harvard, inflicting a lot of senseless damage until the latter makes a 'deal' of some sort.' As a consequence, Conti continued, 'it is now within the realm of possibility that a fate I never thought I would see may come about: an end to American pre-eminence in science and scholarship. Such a result would be a tragedy not only for scholars, but for all patriotic Americans.' In an email, Conti described the revocation of Harvard's certification to participate in the Student and Visitor Exchange Visitor program as a 'capricious and illiberal action, which one might fairly say borders on the nihilistic.' I asked Conti whether the administration wants to bankrupt Harvard and other Ivy League schools as a demonstration of conservative muscle. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
22-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
What Trump Can Learn From the Last G.O.P. Disaster
This is not my first vibe shift. I was there the last time that the American right seemed to have suddenly claimed a real cultural advantage, the last time liberals and the Democratic Party seemed not just politically defeated but existentially baffled, the last time that people talked about conservatism as a rising counterculture poised to rout and remake the establishment. These have been the vibes around Donald Trump's return to power, and they were also the vibes of George W. Bush's presidency in the period immediately following Sept. 11, 2001. I was a young conservative beginning a Washington career at the time, and it felt as though the terrorist attacks had changed the political landscape permanently: discrediting the progressive left, reviving a spirit of patriotism and heroism and national greatness, perhaps inspiring a large-scale return to religion, definitely shifting the entire American establishment toward the right. But not, as it turned out, for long. By the time the Bush presidency limped to its conclusion, the right appeared generationally discredited, and the stage was set for Barack Obama's triumph and the Great Awokening beyond. In hubris and in folly, conservatism had wasted its moment and let a generational opportunity slip away. Could it happen again? Not in the same way or with the same kind of conclusion: Despite his talk about making Gaza an American development project, Trump isn't likely to occupy a Middle Eastern country and attempt a nation-building effort, and cultural progressivism in 2004 had a lot more room to surge forward than does a retreating wokeness now. But already, in the attempted shock and awe of the second Trump administration, you can see ways that the vibe shift of 2025 could be squandered. So it's worth drawing some lessons from the Bush era that might apply to Trump and Elon Musk and other would-be counterrevolutionaries today. The first lesson is not to overread your mandate. Bush-era conservatism built its strong position on one overriding issue — destroying Al Qaeda and killing terrorists — joined to a broader affect of patriotism and religious piety, with moderate stances on government spending and the welfare state. It lost its mandate by expanding the War on Terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, from counterterrorism to nation-building, and also by opening its second term, after an election fought on foreign policy and same-sex marriage, by launching a doomed attempt to remake Social Security. In each case, an unrealistic ideological vision triumphed, and a broader conservative opportunity was lost. Today, Trump-era conservatism has a clear mandate to restrict immigration, fight inflation and wage war on D.E.I., and an arguable mandate in other areas, like the quest for some kind of armistice in Ukraine. It has no obvious mandate for making deep cuts to Medicaid, among other ideas that congressional Republicans are entertaining, or cutting federal funding for the National Park Service or Alzheimer's research (to pick two examples of recent federal work force cuts from Musk's Department of Government Efficiency). In those areas and others, the administration risks reverting to the anti-government style of Republican politics that Trump himself originally defeated, and persuading Americans once again that the right can't be trusted with ordinary stewardship. This connects to the second lesson: If you change it, you own it. This is a revision of Colin Powell's 'you break it, you own it' rule about Iraq, and it applies not just to occupied countries but also to federal agencies and programs that are currently targeted for renovation and job cuts. There are unquestionably many places in the federal leviathan where a ruthless outsider might bring about a necessary revolution. But the would-be reformers need to be aware that their efforts will be judged on performance in a crisis, not just cost savings on a spreadsheet. Maybe that means an outbreak of disease testing a reshaped Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or a Hurricane Katrina-level crisis testing a decentralized version of FEMA. Maybe it just means some unlooked-for failure of administration, akin to the botched Obamacare rollout, in the health or education bureaucracy. In any of these scenarios, the cost-cutters should expect to take blame for failures or disasters, even if their reforms aren't fully responsible for what went wrong. That's just the political risk of being a crusading revolutionary, and it's why it's essential to be careful, prudent and accepting of some institutional wisdom even while you're running an efficiency crusade. The point about institutions brings us to the third lesson: You can't build a new elite without co-opting part of the old elite. Elites are remarkably resilient: Just check on the historical data showing how the old upper class often reappears on the far side of wars and plagues and literal revolutions. So if you go to war against an establishment, you need to be clearly wooing some of its members, making it easy for them to join the winning side, even while you're roughing others up. Bush was pretty good at the roughing-up part, at playing the 'rebel in chief,' as one admiring book put it, but when his presidency hit choppy waters his list of allies thinned out very quickly, and what we now call the 'deep state' had its revenge. Likewise, the Trump administration is unlikely to sustain its revolution if it doesn't co-opt part of the existing professional class — which will not disappear just because some agencies are gutted. The tech right is important in this regard, but it isn't enough. You also need, say, the Federalist Society lawyer currently unsettled by how Trump wants to run the Department of Justice. Or the education wonk who dislikes D.E.I. but cares about the studies that DOGE is cutting. Or the foreign policy hand who welcomes a push to make Europe bear more burdens but recoils from Trump's rhetorical pandering to Vladimir Putin. Or the former liberal who moved rightward in the era of wokeness but still feels wary of identifying fully with populism. Some populist conservatives of my acquaintance would insist that, actually, you don't really need any of these waverers and doubters, because Trump and Musk are defining figures of our era and they've repeatedly proved the naysayers wrong. They will act decisively, and everyone else will catch up and come around. I entirely agree about the historical significance of this president and his tycoon-adviser. But even world-historical figures can walk into disasters (or invade Russia in the winter) if they lack allies or prudence or a clear plan or good advice. And this brings us to the final lesson one should draw from the Bush presidency: that high levels of ambition, charisma and intelligence do not guarantee results. George W. Bush was no genius, but he was the most effective Republican politician of my adult lifetime before Trump came along, and at his peak he enjoyed approval ratings that no U.S. president is ever likely to see again. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were not the equivalent of Musk in terms of entrepreneurial vision and capability, but by the standards of national security officialdom, they were both about as impressive as it gets: exactly the kind of men you would have wanted in charge of an administration facing a new strategic threat. Yet neither Bush's political savvy nor the intelligence of his advisers prevented bad decisions, bad outcomes and political collapse. 'You can just do things' has been a watchword for many conservatives admiring some of Trump's early run of executive actions. There is real wisdom there: As a Bush-era Republican official once told a journalist, an ambitious presidency can, in fact, create its own reality, rather than being bound by what the political establishment believes to be the limits of the possible. But it's also true, as that Republican official discovered, that there are important limits on just how much reality bends itself to power — and it's a very, very good idea to be aware of their existence in advance.
