Social Media Uproar Exposes Partisanship And Intolerance In Scientific Community

A minor brouhaha erupted on social media this week when the editor of Scientific American, Laura Helmuth, in a late-night fit of rage, posted profanity-filled and disparaging comments about those who voted for Donald Trump.¹ [emphasis, links added]

As often happens in social media brouhaha, many are calling for Helmuth to be fired from her role as editor.

However, this is not simply about a highly partisan editor at a magazine and firing her would not address the deeper issues.

Rather, this episode reflects how intense partisanship, often accompanied by intolerance and vitriol, have become normalized in areas of science that are especially close to policy and politics.

Every day I could point you to social media comments by leading and celebrated scientists that make Helmuth’s diatribe look tame.

Leaders of important scientific institutions — including journals, universities, and academies — have not only condoned partisanship and intolerance, they have often rewarded it.²

Consider actions by the leaders of the most prestigious science journals:

• The British journal Nature endorsed Kamala Harris, warning apocalyptically that “the fate of US democracy, science and evidence-based policy hangs in the balance.”
• Following the election, Nature framed the comprehensive Republican victory as being in opposition to the global scientific community: “Scientists around the world expressed disappointment and alarm as Republican Donald Trump won the final votes needed to secure the US presidency.”
• The editor of Science, Holden Thorp had his own social media brouhaha back in 2023 when he denigrated those among the public with different political views than his:
  • “[T]hey don’t actually want science, they want scientific information they can use as they see fit. This gives people the permission to say things like “climate change may be real, but I don’t think we should have government regulation to deal with it,” which is unacceptable.”

  He left X/Twitter soon after.

• When it was revealed in climate scientist Michael Mann’s defamation case that Mann — a blistering political partisan — had spread false rumors accusing a female colleague of sleeping her way to a faculty position and interfering in a journal’s peer review process to prevent a paper’s publication, Thorp simply brushed off this unacceptable behavior: “Passion is not misconduct … It’s perfectly human to react when attacked.”

I could go on (and on and on).³

The increasing partisanship among many in leadership roles in the scientific community is well understood.

For example, a 2022 study of campaign donations by U.S. scientists found — coincident with Trump’s first candidacy — a sharp increase in donations to Democrats and decrease to Republicans:

Analysis of the FEC data confirms that American scientists who donate to political candidates favor Democratic candidates and organizations over Republican ones. In fact, they do so dramatically. However, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. From 1984–2000, the proportion of donations to Republicans among all university and college employees was fairly stable, at around 40 percent. Academic employees favored Democrats, but only slightly. (Data are not available to separately analyze scientists vs. other academic employees before 2002.)

But, from 2000–2021, donations to Republicans fell drastically, to less than 10 percent (Fig. 1). Starting in 2016, professors gave even less to Republicans than did university employees overall, with only about 5 percent of donations from the professoriate going to Republicans. Ivy League professors gave less still—about 2 percent.

The total dollar value of aggregate donations increased dramatically in 2019, when academic donations to Republicans were at a recent historic low. Thus, we can observe that in the past 3 years, academic scientists’ giving has gone almost entirely to Democratic candidates.

I have no doubt that the comments by Helmuth and Thorp about those Americans who voted for Donald Trump represent their deeply and sincerely held views against their fellow citizens.

Climate scientist Mann goes further and often invokes the language of war against his fellow citizens.

We too must choose to do battle against the forces of darkness, fighting back against a malevolent movement that represents fascism, authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, and bigotry, a movement that uses antiscientific disinformation as its preferred weapon.⁴ We do this not because our success is guaranteed. Given the forces mobilized against us, we are clearly the underdog.

I cite Mann not because he is an outlier in the scientific community, but because he is so representative of many who hold positions of leadership and authority — not to mention his blissful unawareness of how offensive his daily public rants are to those who do not share his extreme politics.⁵

…the scientific community has ostracized and cast off from their own ranks those perceived to deviate in their views even a small amount from this orthodoxy.

There are an enormous diversity of political views across the United States, on the left and on the right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any scientist holding extreme political views or expressing them in public — It is a free country and I support all who wish to participate in public debates and discussions.

The larger issue is that the scientific community has chosen to elevate into leadership positions many scientists who oppose and even denigrate the majority of fellow Americans who voted Republican in 2024.

At the same time, the scientific community has ostracized and cast off from their own ranks those perceived to deviate in their views even a small amount from this orthodoxy.⁶

Among some scientists, there is even a view that the scientific community is part of “the resistance” against their fellow citizens.⁷

It can come as no surprise that as the scientific community has increasingly organized itself against normal Americans, many of these normal Americans are increasingly distrustful of scientists and scientific institutions.

For instance, (emphasis added below):

[F]rom January 2019 to May 2023, the percentage of Hispanic Americans expressing a great deal or some confidence in scientists dropped from 82 percent to 61 percent. The pattern is similar for black Americans—from 85 percent to 69 percent over that same period. Generally, non-white Democrats are half as likely as white Democrats to express a great deal of confidence in scientists.

With the red wave that just swept the United States, there are some early encouraging signs within the scientific community that the extreme partisanship of its leaders must now change.

Top photo of the ‘March for Science’ by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

The Honest Broker is written by climate expert Roger Pielke Jr and is reader-supported. If you value what you have read here, please consider subscribing and supporting the work that goes into it.

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