Wars on Science, Real and Otherwise

The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process (2025), edited by Lawrence Krauss, was dead on arrival. The book’s thesis is that academia is under assault from a horde of left-wing academics spreading ‘gender theory’ and ‘critical race studies’. Allegedly, trans people and Black academics are oppressing the simultaneously iconoclastic (but also common-sense) ideas that trans people cannot, by definition, exist, and therefore are undeserving of legal protections and medical care, and Black people are, on the whole, naturally intellectually inferior to white people, and therefore undeserving of their position. For some of the contributors, another threat to free speech and open inquiry is their research institutions ruling their conduct towards their students unprofessional. The broad unstated conclusion is academia must be reconstructed in the image of a lost, halcyon past.

Wars on academia are not without precedent. Consider for a moment Moritz Schlick, the founder of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle, a loose network of left-wing academics, many Jewish. Some were social democrats. Others were socialists and communists. In 1936, on the steps of the University of Vienna, Schlick was shot four times in the chest at close range by a fascist ex-student. The man who assassinated Schlick defended himself on the grounds that he acted out of antisemitic fervour (it did not matter that Schlick was Protestant). He was convicted and imprisoned. Two years later, after the Nazis had secured power in Vienna, he appealed his conviction on the same grounds: murdering Schlick was due to his ‘strong national motives and explicit anti-Semitism’. He was immediately paroled. Most of the Circle–and many other European academics that survived the Nazis–fled to the United Kingdom and United States.

Katy Fulfer is, as of this writing, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. She writes on refugees, feminist philosophy, and bioethics. In 2023, while in her classroom during her instruction of Philosophy 201, a module exploring gender theory, she was stabbed once in the face and across her body. She survived, as did the two philosophy students that were also stabbed by the attacker. The attempted murderer was an ex-student of the university. During the police interview following his attempted murder, he told the officer he ‘just wanted to protect the freedom of academia’; during the trial, he said universities were ‘forcing ideology’ on people—the ideology of ‘gender’. In the months after she was attacked, Fulfer received hate mail and threats against her life.

Modern-day examples of the state’s assault on the university include Orbán’s expulsion of Open University from Hungary, Modhi’s sustained attack on Indian universities, or Trump’s more recent extortion racket on American universities.‘Freedom of speech’ and ‘academic freedom’, rather than twin concerns of the university’s ability to self-govern and faculty and students’ to act without state interference, are twisted for the ends of the state. The UK’s Office for Students, for example, imposed more than a half million pounds in fines on University of Sussex for an unenforced anti-discrimination policy on the grounds that its existence suppressed the free speech of academics that hold bigoted views about trans people.

The War on Science does not include any substantive history of any recognised war on science. It also does not include any history of academic freedom or freedom of speech—of Black Friday, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s attacks on Antioch College, or soldiers indiscriminately shooting students at Kent State. It does not mention Moritz Schlick or Katy Fulfer or any other human being like them. Rather, The War on Science is a paradigm example of Anton Jäger’s concept of ‘hyperpolitics’: a heightened emotional response to momentary moral panics, fads, ‘a form of politicisation without any clear political consequences’. These are the compact, individualised stories that dominate our modes of thinking. In other words, the ‘culture wars’.

Contributors repeatedly attempt to wring out tears over stories about the aggressors and the aggrieved. One contribution, by Dorian Abbot, is a series of admitted fantasies of the imaginings of a ‘Mr. Woke (he/they)’ drinking a venti soy latte, ‘Ms. Oppressed’ winning an award, and ‘Professor Left’ in disputation with ‘Professor Right’. The aggressors are always left-wing academics, bureaucrats and students, who have somehow harmed the aggrieved; the aggrieved are occasionally named, but their views are barely sketched, as with Sally Satel’s article about a lecture she gave in 2021 that received unspecified pushback. She does not explain precisely what she said, but her colleagues’ critique may have to do with her decades-long work speaking out in favour of Purdue’s OxyContin, her employer receiving a substantial amount of funding from Purdue, and her history of sharing drafts of articles supporting prescribing opioids with Purdue officials for comment in advance of publication in major news outlets.

Jäger writes, ‘[hyperpolitics is] a grin without a cat: a politics with only weak policy influence or institutional ties’. The book is, effectively, at war with phantasms and ghosts, and itself an artifact of hyperpolitics. Contributors endlessly complain about filling out ‘DEI’ funding form boxes. In a brief moment of clarity by one author, Geoff Horsman, acknowledges it to be nothing but bureaucratic box-checking. He says, ‘While 2.5 percent [of applications being rejected for failure to properly fill out a box] isn’t huge, it’s still concerning that any grant would be rejected on ideological grounds’. Now Horsman’s specific concerns about 'DEI’ are gone under Trump, along with it tens of millions of dollars in science funding, and innumerable grants rejected or revoked on expressly ideological grounds.

Many of the essays in The War on Science mention (but do not elaborate on) universities forcing an ‘ideology’ on students, the ideology of ‘gender’, the same words used by the man that attacked Fulfer and her two students. This is the same spectre of ‘ideology’ raised by Samuel Alito during oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar, a Supreme Court case about whether state-licensed medal health professionals have a First Amendment right to disregard medical consensus and engage in ‘conversion therapy’, a practice using techniques on queer and trans children that has been compared by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims to torture. ‘The medical consensus is usually very reasonable and it’s very important. But have there been times when the medical consensus has been politicised, has been taken over by ideology?’ said Alito. This form of argument is routinely employed in this book: the expert consensus could be ‘taken over by ideology’, therefore it is taken over by ‘ideology’, therefore the volume’s contributors are like David facing Goliath, or Galileo against the Church, or even Sparta’s three-hundred facing a nameless horde of invaders. Never talk about the concrete issues; always move to a higher level of abstraction about ‘free speech’, ‘debate’ or possible ‘cancellation’.

Once you notice the elisions, you cannot help but see where the authors have dutifully cut around their own positions. Sometimes the scissors slip and we get a sliver of the missing picture, as when Gad Saad says, ‘universities are the progenitors of all the parasitic idea pathogens that have sent the West into a death spiral within the abyss of irrational darkness’ and ‘Academics should be trained to be intellectual Navy SEALs who boldly venture into uncharted territory rather than being meek invertebrate castrati deeply concerned about adhering to the prevailing orthodoxy’, and ‘if the silent majority, all of whom despise these idea pathogens, were to speak out in unison, we would return our universities and, more generally, our societies to their former glory’. This outline takes the general shape of infantile palingenetic ultranationalism.

Another outline is revealed in Alessandro Struma’s essay defending himself against alleged charges of misogyny and racism. He starts with ‘The term “cultural Marxism” remains controversial’, before delving into a niche antisemitic conspiracy theory about ‘postmodernism’ as the product of a secret cabal of Marxists academics ‘gradually occupying institutions to subvert them from within’, creating Marxist concepts such as ‘gender’, ‘critical race theory’, and ‘decolonialism’. ‘Crime spread, and some US towns became no-go areas’, he says. ‘We can say that somebody is taller or somebody is smarter without being attacked by academic mobs. … However, we cannot say that, consequently, genetic drift can result in related differences at the group level… The gender gap is politically correct. The race gap is an unsayable taboo’. You simply cannot say these things anymore, it’s too taboo. The empty space remains: the author’s alleged and obliquely referred-to racist and misogynist comments were unfairly criticised by a secret cabal of Marxists infiltrating academia. Never apologise; always double down.

Richard Dawkins’ essay starts with a thought-experiment: he imagines a race of aliens interested only in the hard sciences. He concludes they would not have ‘their own Foucault or Derrida, their own Judith Butler or “Ibram X. Kendi”’. (Dawkins gives no explanation for why Ibram X. Kendi’s name is in quotation marks.) Since by Dawkins’ stipulation, these fictitious aliens do not analyse or critique their own culture or history, they treat this as ‘beneath their notice: as trivial, as meaningless, as futile as the proverbial angels pirouetting on a pinhead’. Dawkins concludes all social theory is meaningless. This is insipid.

Dawkins provides fourteen examples of apparent hard and fast distinctions between animals categorised as males and females. Unexplored by Dawkins, every example includes the words ‘nearly always’, ‘far more common’ or ‘usually’. Scientists explore the exceptions to the rule, since their very existence—like the black swan swimming by your rowboat—refutes the general theory (e.g. ‘all swans are white’). Dawkins then works backwards from his idiosyncratic definitions to assert intersex people do not—cannot—exist. On the contrary, since intersex people do exist, by modus tollendo tollens, Dawkins is wrong.

Dawkins then compares the existence of trans people to Lysenkoism under Soviet rule. This is not the first time this comparison is made in the volume. Upending reality a second time, Dawkins claims trans people are ‘a politically powerful lobby’ and ‘it is hoped that, in America, it will soon go the way of McCarthyism’ and concludes ‘perhaps the only good thing [Donald Trump] has ever done’ is passing an executive order declaring by fiat that trans people do not exist.

Dawkins concludes that, as with intersex people, trans people cannot exist because biologists categorise animals into two sets ‘based on gamete size’. The relative size of a microscopic part of some cells has never been a determining factor in our self-conception or the categorisation of other humans into different sexes. I know this because we do not perceive the relative sizes of our or anybody else’s gametes. Dawkins obsesses over this irrelevant point for one reason only: how can there be legal protections, mutual respect, or medical care for trans and intersex people if they don’t exist? He defines them out of existence.

Alan Sokal extends Dawkins’ line of attack in ‘How Ideology Threatens to Corrupt Science’. The ‘ideology’ is that the natural sciences must be kept free from racist pseudoscience. But Sokal does not tackle this head-on. Instead, he couches his criticism in second-order critiques of the Terms of Service of the scientific journal, Nature, that permit editors ‘request modifications’ to, ‘refuse publication’, or ‘retract post-publication’ articles that express bigotry. Sokal denies the parsimonious explanation that Terms of Service are written vaguely precisely to deal with edge cases, instead asserting, ‘the editors of Nature have arrogated themselves the right to suppress valid scientific work—work that is both correct and important’.

Let’s unpack this: Science’s Terms of Service permit editors to remove bigoted content from articles. Sokal concludes that fictitious articles that he imagines are retracted in virtue of including bigoted content are ‘both correct and important’. Sokal’s argument is, in reality, an argumentative shell game for why racist articles must be published in scientific journals. Sokal first entices the liberal, saying, ‘if you really care about the truth, you ought to be open to hearing arguments against your current opinions’. The switch occurs between the general principle (listening to criticism from others is good!) and the content of that criticism (sotto voce: did you know bigotry is ‘correct and important’?). Sokal’s tell is obvious: he begins to approvingly reference fringe race scientist and white identitarian Bo Winegard, now executive editor of Aporia, an overtly eugenicist magazine run by the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) (previously run under the name The Pioneer Fund, itself an infamous Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation). Hope Not Hate provided an exposé on the Pioneer Fund’s rebranding as HDF, as well as HDF’s new leadership, modern sources of funding and recent ties to the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland. As Hope Not Hate reports, Winegard now says, ‘Without white identity, European culture, the unique manifestation of the European temperament, will decay’.

Niall Ferguson’s essay compares European and American intellectuals to academics that colluded with the Nazis, turning Julien Benda’s essay on its head and openly stealing its title: ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals'. The charge? ‘That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny’. Ferguson knows this because ‘the son of a Jewish friend’ was subjected to an antisemitic slur. If this evidence feels slight to you, don’t worry, ‘there are too many to mention’. We are not privy to this evidence.

Ferguson’s argumentative chicanery continues through multiple stages of equivocation: a single instance of antisemitism becomes many unspecified instances of antisemitism, which arrives at the core, unstated premise of his article: is there a left-wing academic that opposes Israel’s genocide of Palestianians that isn’t antisemitic? Ferguson’s opaque answer, in an unbearable, circumlocutory passage: ‘It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism’. An antisemitic slur directed at his Jewish friend’s son is transformed into a rapid infection spreading throughout the ivory tower. You see the workings of the trick when you look where he doesn’t want you to: why does Ferguson focus on only comparing left-wing academics to Nazi collaborators? We already know antisemitism is ubiquitous within Western society. If we applied his argument by way of equivocation, why not ‘The Treason of Western Civilisation’?

If we are interested in more apt, specific comparisons of academics colluding with fascists or pushing fascist propaganda, we may consider as candidates the very contributors of this volume that have personally collaborated with the Trump administration (as one contributor, Alex Byrne, was discovered to have secretly done), promulgated far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories (Struma’s secret cabal of Marxists infiltrating academia lifts heavily from Paul Weyrich and William Lind’s version), or cited modern-day eugenicists and white identitarians (Sokal’s reliance on Bo Winegard and other eugenicist contributors to Aporia is but one instance in this volume).

Ferguson concludes, ‘it will take a lot more than a few high-profile resignations to reform the culture of America’s elite universities. It is too much entrenched in multiple departments, all dominated by tenured faculty’. The unstated conclusion: academia requires a mass purge.

What forms of speech must be suppressed? Gad Saad rails against ‘postmodernists, radical feminists, cultural relativists, and social constructivists’. Their ideas are a ‘parasite’ on the body politic for their ‘biophobia (fear of using biology to explain human behaviour)’. He blames his lack of success and low enrolment in his classes on an insidious academic elite and a conspiring student body. He lists his accomplishments, which include writing an ‘international bestseller’ that repeats the same charge of parasitic ideas ad nauseam, and receiving ‘a personal commendation letter’ from the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, as well as ‘Elon Musk’s appreciation of support’. He says, ‘The idea that the pursuit of some knowledge should be forbidden on ideological grounds is anathema to the mission of a university’.

What is this forbidden knowledge of ‘biophobia’? Evolutionary psychologists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja are on the case. They condemn ‘ideologues that have cut off whole lines of inquiry’, which are: our categories of sex/gender are innate and natural; ‘many genes for external appearance (color, facial structure, hair texture)—the very genes that give phenotypic information about ethnicity—are physically linked to other genes, including those for educational attainment’. They allege, ‘Without such knowledge, we’re left with “social constructs” as the sole source of our behaviours’.

Evolutionary psychology’s ur-myth is there are two positions on human nature: either human nature is, as the empiricists like David Hume once argued, like an empty bucket, and filled up by experience; or human nature is transcendent, based on innate capacities. The former position could be seen in a rough reading of Foucault, who focused on the historically contingent structures that determined our lives; the latter seen in Steven Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists. These thinkers argue there is no ‘blank slate’, ‘evolution does not stop at the neck’, and instead naturalise social structures ranging from capitalism to racism.

But Pinker et al.’s position was never in conversation with Foucault or Hume. Instead, Hume and Foucault were in conversation with Kant and Chomsky, respectively, and their thesis was far different from Pinker’s: we all have an innate capacity to learn from experience, develop language, and make quick heuristics and judgements, but since all humans experience different, contingent histories, even with a common starting-point, there will be infinite variation.

Pinker and the evolutionary psychologists have, instead, followed the cuckoo’s strategy and kicked evolutionary biology out of the nest. Their constant mantra, ‘evolution doesn’t stop at the neck’, asserts alleged differences in evolutionary pressures on brains is the ultimate explanation for social difference. This pretender asserts there exists a natural typology of ‘race’, or ‘class’, and concludes that since, by assertion, these categories cannot be socially determined, therefore these categories must be due to differences in intelligence. 

With this false dilemma established, the argument runs its course: the lower classes must be intellectually inferior, otherwise they would be in the upper class; race exists, since why do so many Black people live in poverty? Here comes the pièce de résistance: as another contributor of this volume, Amy Wax, has said in several public venues, ’our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites’, women are ‘less intellectual than men’, ‘the United States is better off with fewer Asians’, it is ‘rational to be afraid of Black men in elevators’, and ‘Blacks’ and ‘non-Western groups’ harbour ‘resentment, shame and envy’ against Westerners for their ‘outsized achievements and contributions’.

Once upon a time, the huckster would don a lab coat and sell an elixir to an ignorant crowd that yearned for a cure-all. The huckster then absconded with the petty cash. The novel development is now there’s no need to sell a product that will regrow your lost hair and increase your virility. The new product is resentment and reaction. The problem is simple: liberalism has ruined your life. Krauss claims, ‘with rare exceptions, no longer are white men shown in public photographs representing the field’ of science. What good does it do anyone to say this is an obvious lie and clearly refuted by experience? And even if Krauss were remotely accurate, who cares? Why is this a problem? Krauss does not elaborate, leaving this claim floating on thin air. To those that bought both the disease and cure, the danger of non-white women in the sciences is obvious.

However, reality casts its dark shadow over the book: the Trump administration slashing science budgets, smothering essential scientific and technological programs in the crib, extorting millions from United States universities, ending vaccination and cancer research programs that would save countless lives, RFK Jr’s. systemic undermining of public health. Krauss’s views on Trump? ‘Executive orders issued [under Trump] require funding agencies to remove numerous extraneous DEI-related programs as well as requirements for grant proposals. This is a very welcome change’. In a hastily-inserted paragraph near the ending of his introduction, Krauss appears to change his mind, now saying, ‘much of the current US infrastructure supporting advanced scientific research may be under siege’. Krauss pulls back before acknowledging how this singular fact refutes the entirety of this book, concluding ‘these new perceived threats, unlike the ones outlined in this book, are largely external’. The extent of disagreement in the volume ranges from Krauss to Strumia, who welcomes this siege, saying in his own addendum, the Trump regime will ‘reclaim America’s educational institutions from the radical left…removing all Marxist DEI bureaucrats’.

This is a failure of basic proportionality. You might think this is due to hypocrisy, but it is not: this volume is a work of political propaganda. It is for radicalising young men and providing the veneer of intellectual legitimacy for the state’s boot on academia’s neck. On the latter front, its existence as a totem may be a political success for its authors, even if most copies end up in the bargain bin before the rest are remaindered.

It was, presumably, a deliberate choice of Krauss et al. to avoid any reputable academic publisher. Instead Krauss found a home in Post Hill Press, a little-known right-wing publisher, known for such titles as United In Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas; Melania Trump: Elegance in the White House (2nd Edition); and One Nation Under God: 40 Devotions for Patriotic Women. The volume does not include the usual acknowledgements section of peer reviewers and editors seen in reputable academic presses. The obvious conclusion is there were none.

The edition I hold in my hand is not a review copy, but for public consumption, and arrived late from the UK publisher, Forum, which is billed as ‘a space for free debate and bold ideas’. It publishes the exact same types of books as Post Hill Press. The UK edition does not include thirty-nine contributors, as stated in its US edition’s subtitle; it includes twenty-two. Krauss does not explain the decision to eliminate so many contributors. One possibility is Forum wanted to save money on printing costs. It was not to save face in light of the several contributors’ connections to Trump’s close friend and infamous serial child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Their essays remain untouched in the UK edition. There is no index and bibliography, the bare minimum for any professional collected volume. Instead, you can scan a QR code on the last page of the book to download a PDF. The PDF is disorganised and follows different idiosyncratic citation styles. Many of the references are to fringe race scientists affiliated with Aporia or long-discredited anti-trans studies.

Krauss claims to ‘have at most lightly edited the pieces’, most of which were previously published on personal blogs and in right-wing media outlets. It shows. Even with so many essays removed, the repetition is exhausting. None of the one-sided stories of alleged attacks by leftist cabals carry an internal logic. They do not reflect how most normal people respond to stimuli. The essays are generally self-serving, conspiratorial and paranoid. Out of the few that I have been able to look up in detail are misrepresented to a degree that verges on the criminal. The YouTuber Shaun’s video documenting the factual misrepresentations in this volume totals more than four hours.    Consequently, the UK’s far more strict libel laws may also explain why the UK edition has excised so many essays, especially those that excuse these contributors’ alleged sexual harassment of their students.

Peeling back the layers of resentment and second-order debates about ‘controversial ideas’ we have the core: a set of bigoted pseudoscientific theories that were ultimately killed, gutted, and tossed onto the rubbish heap of history long ago. The simplistic categories of ‘race’ and ‘sex’, once declared to be on par with natural kinds were, due to the diligent work of real academics, revealed to be historically contingent and socially constructed—as real as a dollar bill or a border—even if they were the products of the multiplication and diversification of expressions of our common human nature. These ideas are real enough to someone sleeping rough or a migrant, but real only insofar as other people make them matter.

One question remains: why is academia a discipline that, when contrasted to other areas of work, treats the unscholarly statements of a crank as worthy of unique protection and our collective attention? Don’t fall for their misdirection. Billions of other workers across the globe are obscured. This usual behaviour of repeatedly expressing reprehensible views, if conducted in any other setting, would usually lead to dismissal for misconduct. I suppose, by successfully directing our attention away from the struggles we all share to focus on their petty, imagined grievances in hyperreality, they make the case for why they are worthy of our attention. It’s an incredible trick.

Exploring what radicalised these individuals into contributing to this volume is as informative as asking an iron filling why it responds to a magnet. In reality, these individuals are fungible, both in academia and within the right-wing influencer shadow economy. Their shift to reaction isn’t explained through reason and evidence (this volume demonstrates they lack both), but economic incentives, social pressures, and an ossified brain structure facing recalcitrant evidence. In the words of Principal Skinner, ‘Am I so out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong.’

Credit must go to Krauss et al. for helping legitimate the Trump regime’s carnage. Congratulations, you got exactly what you wanted. Unfortunately, by doing so, they reduce themselves to the first step in the short radicalisation pipeline of a generation of young men now joining ICE, or for younger generations, perhaps on their gradual journey to shooting up a school. One young boy listening to their fancy rhetoric might even kill the next Schlick or Fulfer. The contributors to this volume function to feed resentment, and it grows. Watch it grow. But this is a small price to be paid. There’s gold in them thar hills.

Featured image is "Galileo before the Holy Office," Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury 1847. Modified.