When the Police Raid the Neighborhood: The Real Lesson of Science’s Politicization

(Or: The Whistleblowers Weren’t the Problem)

Imagine some people in your neighborhood are mixed up in organized crime—say drug trafficking. Some locals decide to blow the whistle because they worry that the whole community will get a bad reputation, and they start urging everyone else to speak up too. Most people, though, just keep their heads down, understandably reluctant to pick a fight with the gang leaders and their enablers.

And then someday a new mayor arrives in town, eager to look tough on crime. In a big show of force, he has the entire neighborhood raided. Dozens are arrested, including plenty of people who did nothing wrong. Shops are shut down, and community leaders are strong-armed into accepting harsh, sweeping measures against anything that looks even remotely suspicious.

Now, what would you think of someone who blamed the internal whistleblowers as follows:

“Why did you bad-mouth your own neighborhood when a much bigger threat was looming on the horizon? You kept harping about some petty crime that may or may not have happened, while the police were gearing up for a massive crackdown. You didn’t see where the real danger was coming from.”

That, in a nutshell, is the reaction from a lot of left-leaning academics and journalists to The War On Science, a new collection edited by the physicist Lawrence Krauss, to which I contributed a chapter along with 38 others (including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal, Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja and Carole Hooven).

The collection, written and assembled before Donald Trump’s re-election, argues that scientific institutions have been increasingly captured by left-wing ideology: prestigious journals announcing the screening of submissions on political grounds; activists canceling and deplatforming speakers who stray from orthodoxy; Ivy League universities punishing students for using the wrong pronouns or other speech violations; professional societies embracing progressive doctrines on sex and gender that clash with their own disciplines’ evidence, and so on.

In short, we’re describing an internal assault on science, largely waged from within academia—a contemporary version of what student leader Rudi Dutschke once called a “long march through the institutions.”

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? In fact, many left-wing critics were already singing this tune long before they even had the chance to read our work. For instance, this post from April, shortly after our publisher announced the title and list of contributors, racked up nearly 10,000 likes on Bluesky (which is pretty huge for this relatively small platform). Likewise, Jonathan Howard at Science-Based Medicine wrote that, because the whole lot of us was so “ensconced in their pundit fantasy world” we had the “luxury of pretending that the real threat to science came not from Trump and his minions, but rather from “cancel culture, DEI, gender, and race’.”

This isn’t just an annoying bit of whataboutism, where critics scold us for not having written an entirely different book on a different topic. The little story in my intro makes the point: when 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. As sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis says in this interview about our book: “We made ourselves into political actors and so therefore became political targets.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, the editor of the book, has openly acknowledged that Trump’s assault on science poses a more immediate and pressing threat in the U.S.: “By attacking the work of the best, brightest, and most productive scientists in the country, this new war on science being waged by the administration is, at least in the near term, far more damaging than the woke attacks.” However, the point is not that we’re facing two separate attacks on science from different directions and are now trying to determine which one deserves more of our attention—the point is that the more severe external assault was motivated by the internal war, marking a further escalation in the politicization of science. Conversely, these Trumpian attacks now risk radicalizing left-wing ideologues in academia even further, convincing them that science must become an even stronger fortress of progressive ideology.

You can already see it playing out. Thanks to Trump’s ham-fisted attack on DEI and campus antisemitism, anyone criticizing DEI programs now risks being lumped in with the Trumpian Right. Case in point: this hatchet job posing as a book review in New York Magazine, with the subtle-as-a-brick title: “How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science”.

The reviewer claims that we—the book’s authors—weren’t merely blindsided by the MAGA assault on science, but have actively contributed to it. By “railing against DEI, critical race theory, and social justice for years,” the argument goes, we supposedly “provided fuel and ammunition” to Trump and his allies, in effect joining their camp.

This line of reasoning is strikingly similar to the argument, endlessly repeated by progressives (mostly in Europe), that we shouldn’t discuss the negative consequences of mass migration, as doing so might “help the Far Right”. The reality, however, is quite the opposite—it’s precisely the unwillingness of progressives to engage honestly with these uncomfortable truths that drives people toward the Far Right. Similarly, many academics’ reluctance to call out the ideological antics within their own circles has led to a widespread perception that universities have devolved into left-wing boot camps (which is still a wild exaggeration).

By the way, I’m flattered that New York Magazine has singled out my chapter for special scorn, devoting a whole paragraph to it.¹ The author even manages to hand me a backhanded compliment: “There’s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry’s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde.” I’ve long admired Hitchens’ virtuosity and acerbic wit, so being compared to him is about as high a compliment as I can imagine (never mind that Hitchens was actually quite critical of Zionism, a detail our intrepid critic seems blissfully unaware of).

Finally, many of the book’s critics are so fixated on Trump that they treat the U.S. as the center of the universe. If you’re an academic in America, fair enough: the aggressive right-wing attack on science is likely to give you more headaches than the left-wing assault, at least for the time being. But there are plenty of countries where Trump isn’t president and where universities are not sued by a right-wing government. If you’re an academic in one of those places and you’d like to avoid becoming the target of a politicized backlash, it’s worth asking what provoked it elsewhere. If you don’t want to end up like Harvard or Columbia, then don’t go down the road they traveled.

That is exactly the advice I give at the end of my own chapter: restore institutional neutrality, cultivate viewpoint diversity, and halt the ideological rot that’s been spreading for decades. If you continue to politicize science, then sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost.

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I previously published my chapter here on Substack, including all my sources (ignored by New York Magazine). And here’s my own interview with Lawrence Krauss about my chapter:

If you want to read the whole thing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Or just buy the whole book of course, and you’ll get 38 other perspectives on the ideological attacks on science! 😉

1. The criticism in that paragraph is quite fatuous. My point was not that anyone at Harvard has explicitly called for a genocide of Jews—though chants to "Globalizing the intifada" come perilously close, if you know what the last intifada looked like—but that Harvard applies an egregious double standard when treating different minorities. As for Israel being the "only liberal democracy" in the region, she retorts: "by what metric, he never says". Better question: by what metric not? See the democracy index of Economist Group or Freedom House. I thought this was so well-known that it didn't need a citation. Apparently not at New York Magazine.