Prominent atheists are weaponizing the "War on Science" to push right-wing grievances

Republicans are waging a real war on science. But a new book, edited by Lawrence Krauss, thinks the enemies of science are DEI and "cancel culture."

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More than three dozen Very Serious “scientists and scholars,” including several well-known atheists, have contributed essays to a forthcoming book about the “war on science” that will be released by a right-wing publisher.

Those contributors include Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Peter Boghossian, Steven Pinker, and Lawrence Krauss (the book’s editor).

Before I go any further, just ask yourself two questions.

1. If you were going to publish a book about the “war on science” in 2025, what would you cover?

Maybe how the Trump Administration has fired thousands of employees at our nation’s finest science agencies? Or how Republicans are decimating funding for research in areas that the private sector will never fund because it’s not obviously profitable for them? Or how Trump is destroying the NIH? Or how Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement? Or left the World Health Organization? Or promoted anti-vaxxers to positions of prominence while a measles outbreak is currently underway and bird flu remains a very real threat?

That list could go on for a while because the current Republican Party is arguably the biggest threat to scientific progress our nation has ever seen. It’s led by people who openly reject science and abhor the very scientists who contribute to our communal knowledge of what’s happening.

2. If you were going to publish a book about anything, would you want to work with a publisher that promotes conservative ideologues?

In 2021, after being part of the police raid that shot and killed an unarmed Breonna Taylor in her Louisville apartment, police officer Jonathan Mattingly announced that he was going to publish his own version of events in The Fight for Truth: The Inside Story Behind the Breonna Taylor Tragedy.

There was so much backlash to the idea of a killer cop profiting off the murder of a Black woman that Simon & Schuster refused to distribute the book even though it was being published by one of its imprints.

“Like much of the American public, earlier today Simon & Schuster learned of plans by distribution client Post Hill Press to publish a book by Jonathan Mattingly,” the publisher said in a statement. “We have subsequently decided to not be involved in the distribution of this book.”

Post Hill Press, as the New York Times described it, is a publisher that specializes in “Christian and conservative political books.” And the company stood by Mattingly.

Kelsey Merritt, a spokeswoman for Post Hill Press, said in a statement that it still planned to publish the book. “His story is important and it deserves to be heard by the public at large,” she said. “We feel strongly that an open dialogue is essential to shining a light on the challenging issues our country is facing.”

The same publisher has put out a book by conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino and is (or at least was) led by someone who used to run Humanix Books, a subsidiary of the right-wing outlet Newsmax.

That’s the publisher that Krauss, Dawkins, and all the rest are now working with to release their book.

It shouldn’t be surprising given that these people have become better known for their reflexively reactionary, anti-trans, “anti-woke” views than for any of their contributions to science.

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

There aren’t many details available yet about The War on Science, which will be published in July, but after sharing a list of contributors late last year, Krauss recently shared the table of contents… and yikes.

It’s clear they’re not interested in the actual war being waged on science.

What aspects of the “war on science” are they covering?

• The supposed attack on “free speech”

• How academic disciplines have apparently been corrupted by ideology.

• “Cancel culture.”

• The problems with DEI.

• Issues concerning gender and race.

It’s a litany of right-wing grievances that are better suited for Joe Rogan’s podcast than anything else. These are not the subjects actual scientists discuss when they’re commiserating with each other about what keeps them up at night. The list makes about as much sense as discussing hydroxychloroquine among the scientists who developed COVID vaccines.

Even the publisher’s own description of the book ignores the Republican elephants in the room in favor of these self-described rationalists’ pet issues:

From assaults on merit-based hiring to the policing of language and replacing well-established, disciplinary scholarship by ideological mantras, current science and scholarship is under threat throughout western institutions. As this group of prominent scholars ranging across many different disciplines and political leanings detail, the very future of free inquiry and scientific progress is at risk. Many who have spoken up against this threat have lost their positions, and a climate of fear has arisen that strikes at the heart of modern education and research. Banding together to finally speak out, this brave and unprecedented group of scholars issues a clarion call for change.

Science and scholarship really are under threat. Scientific progress really is at risk. There is a climate of fear that is impacting research.

The threats, however, are not coming from protesting college students, so-called language police, or left-wing bloggers. They’re coming from the highest levels of the government, which is something you apparently wouldn’t realize if you read this book.

If you think trying to get people of color and women involved in science and protecting the civil rights of trans people are bigger threats to scientific fields than all the things Republicans are doing with their power, then you’ve completely lost the thread.

Even the one blurb urging people to read this book is pathetic:

“Higher education isn’t what it used to be. Cancel Culture and DEI have caused many to keep their mouths shut. Not so the authors of this book. This collection of essays tells of threats to open inquiry, free speech, and the scientific process itself. A much-needed book.” —Sabine Hossenfelder, Physicist and Author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions

The people who claim they’re canceled often have the largest audiences. And if you’re keeping your “mouths shut” because of DEI, you ought to be thanking the administrators for preventing you from saying something you’re bound to regret.

But this is what the contributors care about because they can’t be bothered to go after the real problems anymore.

Scientific progress is literally at risk right now and this “unparalleled group of prominent scholars” can’t spare a single brain cell between them to document the actual origins of the threat.

Just consider DEI. Krauss has celebrated dismantling the “DEI nightmare,” even calling on Elon Musk to defund science institutions that did any kind of work in that capacity. I’ve written about this before, but Krauss has argued that over 10% of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s grants were for DEI initiatives rather than science. He calculated this—I shit you not—by asking ChatGPT to decide if each of the NSF’s grants in 2023 were primarily “scientific” or “DEI.” It never occurred to him that grants to underprivileged groups could also be scientific in nature or that there could be scientific value in getting input from people with different backgrounds. He acts like minorities were getting money for reasons that had no basis in what they were studying.

(Besides that—and only because it’s always worth pointing out—Krauss continued to accept money from Jeffrey Epstein even after the latter pleaded guilty to soliciting minors for prostitution. Krauss defended Epstein back in 2011 with one of the most disturbing, poorly aging, and downright arrogant quotations you’ll ever hear: “Jeffrey [Epstein] has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women, but they're not as young as the ones that were claimed… As a scientist, I always judge things on empirical evidence, and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people… I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.")

Meanwhile, Coyne and Dawkins can’t stop demonizing transgender people, insisting they’re deluded and unfamiliar with how biology works. Pinker has been fixated on fighting social justice and “wokeness.” Boghossian still thinks he’s a victim of free speech and has waged a war on pronouns.

Jordan Peterson is still Jordan Peterson. (Imagine writing a book about the threats to science and thinking, You know which voice of reason we need to include? The guy who tweeted out fetish porn because he seriously believed it came from a Chinese sperm-extraction factory.)

Other contributors to the book include those whose personal controversies include calling for more white people (and fewer Asians) in the country, defending that blatant racism, arguing that the bones of indigenous people belong to science and not tribes, supporting Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, denouncing Black Lives Matter while backing the use of the N-word, denying the impacts of climate change, perpetuating the opioid crisis, getting accused of gender-based harassment, getting accused of sexual misconduct, etc. Just a rogue’s gallery of people who routinely get dunked on by the entire internet for good reason, then pretend to be the True Victims™.

Many of these people work with the right-wing “University of Austin,” signed the much-maligned Harper’s Letter, routinely promote The Free Press, or want nothing more than to be in the orbit of Bari Weiss. They think Bill Maher still speaks truth to power and get excited whenever a conservative New York Times op-ed columnist defends bigotry. Many of them resigned from their cushy university jobs (before they could get fired) after the backlash to whatever they said or did made them martyrs among conservatives—only to gain notoriety for supposedly getting silenced. They whine about free speech because they can’t handle criticism and refuse to adjust their thinking when confronted with better and more nuanced information—precisely the opposite of what science requires.

In short, the people who have thrown away any credibility they once had are now claiming to understand the real attacks on science, and not a single chapter in the book explicitly covers the harm caused by Republicans. These buffoons act like progressive activists, trans people asserting their humanity, universities that celebrate inclusion, and academics who study areas and publish papers they don’t understand (or think are beneath them) are the true enemies of science… as opposed to the politicians who are actively dismantling the finest scientific institutions in the world.

There is a valuable book about the modern war on science that is just waiting to be written.

This one, however, is a farce before a single page has even been released.

On a side note, I find it just plain weird that Krauss wrote a foreword to a different book with an identical name just a few years ago. Not sure why any author would duplicate a title, especially when the first book actually covered the same topic in far more depth than this one.

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