Radical Protests Shut Down Science, Nature for a Day

This is fucking crazy

Radical activists persuaded top science journals to stop work on June 10 and to validate their claims of “white supremacy” throughout the American science sector.

The willingness of top scientists to submit to the radicals’ half-disguised political goals is a dangerous failure, said Bret Weinstein, a biologist and a champion for free speech. In a June 10 broadcast on YouTube, he argued thas the radicals will use the one-day June 10 concession to demand more damaging concessions from science, he said, adding:

If you think you’re helping black people by “Shutting Down STEM!,” you have not understood what’s going on. Science is the key to avoiding bias. It is the key to escaping oppression. It is the key to discovering what it is about our system that is systematically biased, and to eliminate it. So you are doing black people no favor by challenging that mechanism.

Scientists should reject the political pressure, he said:

The question is, do you have the intelligence to see where we are? And do you have the fortitude to stand up to this nonsense and say, “No, I won’t be a party to it.” And if you do, then, welcome.

Weinstein’s response came after a small group of black academics and scientists used the emotional wave caused by the police death of George Floyd to demand that science be reorganized to help black Americans in science. The group pushed the hashtag #ShutDownSTEM.

One of the manifestos demanded that the goal of “justice” be prioritized above scientists’ discovery of objective reality:

We must confront the institutional barriers to justice for Black people in academia and beyond, challenge the notion of the meritocracy whereby “objective and neutral” criteria infused with systemic racism are used to exclude Black people from physics and other academic disciplines, and rebuild our institutions and collaborations in a way that is just and equitable …

Every single institution around the world can and should get involved in this work.

Another manifesto portrayed all scientists who put science first are racists: “Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it.”

Several of the activists declined to respond to emails from Breitbart News.

In response to the manifestos, two of the leading science publications, Science Magazine and Nature, agreed to halt their advocacy for science on June 10 and instead use their Twitter accounts to post demands and claims by some of the radicals.

Racism is endemic in U.S. science, said one tweet from the Nature account: “Racism and prejudice are woven into the structures in which we all live and work — and into us,” writes @AngelaDSaini.

“Socio-economic and health disparities [are] caused by historical segregation and endemic racism in the U.S.,” said another Nature tweet.

“If academic societies want to support Black scientists, they would ensure minorities are editors, reviewers, and authors of peer reviewed papers,” said a tweet by Science Magazine.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/10/radical-protests-shut-down-science-nature-for-a-day/