We've done a lot of posts on Scientific American. Candidate Hillary Clinton proudly stated in her nomination speech, "I believe in science." What does that mean? If someone in a white lab coat tells you something it must be true? Conservatives believe in the scientific method … which journals like Nature and Scientific American seem to have abandoned.

Let's check our archives on Scientific American. In 2022, Scientific American devoted an entire "collectors edition" to "science for social justice." SciAm told us that before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex. A physician tried to argue that abortion was a "moral good" using quantum mechanics. They've written about the racist stigmatization of black women's bodies and obesity. The editorial board came out against the "bigotry, megalomania, hate, and Intolerance" of Gov. Ron DeSantis and his anti-science agenda. The magazine also broke a 175-year tradition by endorsing a candidate for president — Joe Biden, because "the 2020 election is literally a matter of life and death."

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and describes the "ideological capture" of Scientific American for The City Journal.

Unscientific American
What went wrong at the nation’s leading popular science magazine (includes my own run of 214 consecutive monthly columns at Scientific American and the ideological capture of the editors after 2016):https://t.co/94kqnxahi3

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) May 5, 2024

James B. Meigs writes:

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

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Most recently, Scientific American has reported on the decades of data supporting puberty blockers and against "sex essentialism," the belief that you can sufficiently describe sex in binary terms by a few particular characteristics, such as gametes.

Right now, if a scientist wanted to research the possible contribution to gender dysphoria by environmental factors or fetal exposure to drugs, for instance, they would lose their career.

— Bill Me (@bill_konersman) May 6, 2024

Was an avid subscriber until 2014 when all the science became indoctrination instead of science. Unrecognizable today, really. Wish I could remember the article that pushed me over the edge. Today you could pick just about ANY article and THAT would be why. NatGeo too.

— SMSPirate (@SMSPirate) May 6, 2024

Unfortunately it seems that New Scientist, another favorite of mine seems to be headed down the same path.

— The Boring Dad (@the_boring_dad) May 6, 2024

Looking forward to reading this. The fall of Sci Am into woke gibberish, a magazine I loved to read as a kid, and that inspired my interest in science, has been one of the most alarming signs of how our media is totally captured

— Encrenqueira (@classlib99) May 6, 2024

The problem is not limited to scientific American and it is big. Other magazines and news outlets have consistently been unable to report accurately.

— Karen Orlando (@KarenFOrlando) May 5, 2024

Can shorten article by 80%.
"Unfortunately, progressive activists today begin with their preferred policy outcomes or ideological conclusions and then try to force scientists and journalists to fall in line."

— John Anderson (@CuiBono_Okie) May 6, 2024

Another recent article: "Is climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even racial anxiety? Put another way, is climate anxiety just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or get 'back to normal,' to the comforts of their privilege?"

I went into the sciences largely due to the readings I forced myself to do with SciAm as a teenager. Their ideological capture by the specifically pseudoscientific social justice zealots have made the magazine useless.

— SinNombre (@SinNomb54107159) May 6, 2024

This is the "science" that Clinton and Biden believe in. Of course, there's a scientific consensus about climate change and transgenderism, because anyone who questions them will ever be published.

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