Lawrence Krauss' "The War on Science" is a gift to science's real enemies

The book promised to discuss current threats to science, then ignored the Trump administration's calls to torch it once they came into power

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Earlier this year, I wrote about a forthcoming book called The War on Science because it featured essays from several well-known atheists including Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Peter Boghossian, Steven Pinker, and Lawrence Krauss, the book’s editor.

(Somehow, they thought it would be wise to include Jordan Peterson, too.)

You might think a book like that would go all in on Donald Trump’s constant attacks on science, whether it’s stripping funding from universities that do all kinds of basic scientific research, appointing a conspiracy theorist to be in charge of the nation’s health, defunding the NIH, denying climate change, etc.

Instead, the book focused almost entirely on how liberals and progressives have supposedly undermined science by promoting DEI, claiming transgender people exist, and corrupting science with their left-wing “ideology.”

It’s an entire book whining about “wokeness.” Published by a conservative publishing company known for putting out a book by conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino and is (or at least was) led by someone who ran a subsidiary of the right-wing outlet Newsmax.

Lawrence Krauss edited The War on Science (screenshot via YouTube)

I laid out my numerous problems with that book, and that became the basis for a script I wrote for a YouTube video by Drew McCoy that now has well over 300,000 views.

Since that time, the book has been released and absolutely destroyed by critics who actually understand what science is up against—and who the actual enemies are. (Spoiler: It’s not Black people getting scholarships in STEM.)

As Sarah Jones wrote for New York magazine:

There are nearly 40 chapters in The War on Science, all pockmarked by omissions, misrepresentations, and, sometimes, obvious lies. Each section of the anthology addresses a different facet of the woke threat to reason, but a few common obsessions emerge: Genitals and what people do with them, Israel, DEI, and various professional insults — it’s all here, boomer Facebook on every page.

…

The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms.

Dr. Jonathan Howard was even more blunt in an essay for Science-Based Medicine, saying the book “was written as if the past 8 years never happened, and it should be titled Renowned Scientists and Scholars Who Were in a Coma.”

I don’t know how many copies of the book have sold in the month since its release, but it’s been incredible to see some of the contributors attempt to justify this publication in the face of such obvious threats to science. There isn’t a day that goes by without seeing the Trump administration set fire to some monumental feat of science. Not long ago, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that the government would rescind nearly $500 million in funding for nearly two dozen grants studying mRNA vaccines—a move that Nature called the “highest irresponsibility.” (He’s now making it harder for people to get vaccines, period.)

And yet what’s their biggest defense of an other indefensible book?

We had no idea Trump would do this.

I shit you not: That is what they’re saying.

Krauss himself wrote an article for Reason in which he tried to both-sides this whole thing.

Activists inside universities have hijacked many administrative functions, and significant reform is needed to ensure free speech, open inquiry, and the integrity of scholarship. But the Trump administration has used this fact to launch what may be a more dangerous direct attack on university scientific and research infrastructures across the nation.

You see, some activists pushed for more inclusion in the world of STEM, and that’s very bad. But Trump decimating our nation’s scientific infrastructure “may be a more dangerous direct attack.” Maybe. Possibly. It’s up for debate whether the real enemies here are the YouTube trolls who now control all of government funding or some blue-haired liberals who annoy me on Twitter.

Krauss has repeatedly used the argument that his myopia should be forgiven because he put the book together before this administration came into power:

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Krauss promoted the book on a right-wing website’s podcast.

Philosopher Maarten Boudry, who also contributed to the book, implied there was no way of knowing how awful Trump would be:

In the time between the writing and publishing of our book, however, Donald Trump was re-elected as president, and started to launch a very different kind of “war on science” of his own: cracking down on prestigious institutions, slashing research funding on anything that smacks of progressive causes, and threatening scientific journals to scrap DEI initiatives and reinstate strict meritocracy.

So, is it true, as the kids say, that our book “didn’t age well,” becoming cringe-worthy and out of touch even before it hit the shelves? How could we have been so oblivious to the looming right-wing assault on science while we were preoccupied with left-wing critiques?

Don’t worry. He has an answer to those questions. He just blames… the left… for annoying the right. (That argument has big Well, what were you wearing? vibes.)

… [W]hen there’s rampant crime in a neighborhood and the community leaders look the other way, it creates the perfect opening for a sweeping police crackdown. In the same vein, the incursions of left-wing ideology in universities and other academic institutions have helped to turn them into prime targets for the populist Right. If you turn universities and academic journals into partisan lobby groups, don’t be shocked when you find yourself in the political crosshairs.

Yes, it is true that Trump’s assault on universities is both reprehensible and unconstitutional, that his professed concern about antisemitism is just a pretext for “owning the libs”, and that his sudden embrace of academic freedom is disingenuous—he just wants to swap one orthodoxy for another. But that is exactly why we should have cleaned our Augean stable before it came to this.

It never occurs to these people that dismantling the scientific establishment has always been a goal of conservatives. They’ve been fantasizing about it for decades; they just never had both the power to do it and a leader who didn’t give a shit about it until now. “Wokeness” isn’t the problem. Wokeness is the Republican scapegoat for everything they wanted to do anyway.

Jerry Coyne made a similar argument on his site, saying the book came together before Trump did all this… before arguing Trump’s assaults on science would be reversed in due time, but the woke attacks would stain the field for “generations.”

The book was put together before Trump began his assault on universities by punishing science grantees and by appointing people like RFK Jr. to science positions. I expected that, after this unpredictable bout of executive-branch bullying, there would be some wokesters who adopted a “whataboutery stance,” saying, “This book largely comprises attacks on how the progressive Left wing is eroding science. But Trump is dong much more damage from the Right.” And right now that is indeed the case, but Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed), the government will cut back strongly on interfering in the funding and production.

The effect of the Right on science, then, will probably be more temporary. In contrast, that from the Left will last a lot longer, for progressive professors who believe in nonsense like a spectrum of sex in animals will teach this nonsense to their students, and thus it will pass among academic generations. We simply cannot sit by and let progressives distort science in the cause of ideology, regardless of what the Right is doing.

Given the path we’re on, he might get his wish. There won’t be any science left to “distort” if and when this administration ever ends…

But to his core point: The idea that a Democratic administration can just magically fix everything Trump is actively breaking is bullshit. As any scientist could tell you, if you interfere with long-term experiments, you can’t just hit “unpause” if you get some grant money years later. If you’re prevented from studying mRNA vaccines, we won’t have that technology available if and when we need it in the immediate future. If we don’t address the climate crisis now, it may be too late to do anything about it.

Coyne has also criticized his critics because we “didn’t even read the damn book.” Even though the table of contents was available for months before publication and just about all the essays are reprints of pieces that were already available online for free. (So much for critical thinking.)

When liberals say Trump is doing permanent damage to the country, it’s not hyperbole. It’s not just norms being destroyed. The administration is setting fire to the foundation of what makes us such a powerful force in the world of science. And Republicans are doing everything in their power—like gerrymandering—to make sure Democrats can’t regain enough power to undo that.

And yet guys like Coyne are literally arguing that the far bigger threat to science comes from professors who acknowledge a gender spectrum.

All of these people are offering some variation of the following: Trump is bad, sure, but the left is worse. And they would have criticized Trump a lot more if they were writing the chapters today, but they turned in their drafts minutes before Trump came into office, so how could they possibly know this is what would happen?

Maybe they should have listened to the damn liberals who have been saying all this for years now.

As Dr. Howard wrote in his piece (italics his):

Seeing these renowned scientists and scholars belatedly catch up is like watching a baby grasp object permanence. For them, Trump’s risk became real only the moment they could no longer deny it, not one second sooner.

Yet even now, these renowned scientists and scholars casually acknowledge Trump’s threat only to promote their book. This requires them to complain about “progressives“, many of whom were light years ahead of them in recognizing Trump’s threat and trying to combat it. While many “progressives” stuck their necks out, these renowned scientists and scholars sat on the sidelines and undermined them.

When I wrote about Project 2025, in October of 2023, the planned destruction of science was obvious. The document said about climate change, “the Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” It said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which included the National Weather Service, needed to be dismantled because it was “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It called for limiting access to abortion drugs by lying about its safety and efficacy. It said the CDC should stop compiling data about gender identity because it “legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa).” It wanted to do away with vaccine mandates and prohibit research involving “aborted fetal cells and aborted baby body parts,” as if babies were being tossed in a blender for the sake of science.

That’s just a brief glimpse at what everyone who was paying attention knew the Trump administration planned to do if they regained power—and it’s honestly been so much worse than that.

You could have written about the Republican Party’s assault on science at any point in the past few decades and it still would have been exponentially worse than whatever these morons think DEI is now doing to their bubble. To pretend this was unknowable before this year is an admission that they don’t pay any attention to the fields in which they claim to be experts.

And that’s before you get to the damn Jordan Peterson chapter.

If they wanted to get away with that idiotic line of reasoning, all they had to do was say something like this right up front:

The chapters in this book deal with dumb shit that annoys us, but it all pales in comparison to what Trump is doing today. Even though we’re supposed experts in communication, we chose to focus our time entirely on why liberals are ruining science while barely mentioning what conservatives are up to. Stop complaining about it. We promise we’ll include tiny bits of Trump-y criticisms somewhere at the end of the book as a reward for anyone who wasted time reading it. Anyway, you twit, have I told you about my dear friend Jeffrey Epstein?

Instead, a group of gullible “renowned” experts who think J. K. Rowling makes good points and Bari Weiss is an arbiter of truth and Bill Maher is the height of political humor are reminding people why they never deserve to be taken seriously anymore.

The War on Science isn’t a defense of reason. It’s a monument to intellectual cowardice. Its authors, armed with petty grievances about pronouns and diversity programs, aimed their intellectual firepower on paper cuts that exist only in their minds while everyone around them is being decapitated. They act like the biggest problems in science involve grad students asking for inclusive policies, professors acknowledging biological complexity, or institutions offering STEM scholarships to underrepresented groups.

To publish such a book now, in the face of deliberate and systemic sabotage from the highest levels of government, is not only ridiculous, it’s malpractice for any half-decent scientist or science communicator. Even Jordan Peterson should be embarrassed—and that’s saying something.

Every page wasted on performative outrage over “wokeness” is a page that could have been used to sound the alarm about the real, ongoing destruction of the scientific world. And given that many of these authors have spent the past few years appealing to right-wing bigots, that could have been extremely useful.

Instead, by pretending that the greatest threat to science comes from progressive inclusion rather than authoritarian arson, Krauss and his allies have given cover to those who would dismantle our research institutions. They’re compiling propaganda for those who want to bury science under the weight of their own ignorance. They are enablers who fiddle with culture war nonsense while the laboratories burn.

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