It’s Alt-Right v. (Springer) Nature

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire

Scientific and scholarly journals are now in the crosshairs of the alt-right as a group of radical ideologues works to dismantle “elitist” institutions — the kind established to make government more efficient while curing polio, driving measles to the brink of extinction, extending lifespans, ensuring nutrition, predicting hurricanes, exploring our solar system, thwarting pandemics, and elucidating much of the natural world, all while making the US the richest nation on Earth.

These efforts to diminish legitimate science and scholarship have also aligned interests around grift-based pseudoscience and “free information/speech” issues.

Rather than Elsevier being the whipping boy this time, now it’s Springer Nature — because, as one bright light on the alt-right puts it, “It’s European.”

An article on Breitbart describes how DOGE is going after “woke” medical journals, with Nature as the poster child.

• Of course, Nature isn’t a medical journal, but these people aren’t known for their nuanced thinking or knowledge of subtle distinctions in specialist areas.

The journals system is compared to a “cartel,” as is higher education. This echoes the lawsuit filed by newly minted OA radical Lucina Uddin in 2024. (The lawsuit is currently still being adjudicated, with a potentially important procedural ruling coming this summer.)

One example of “woke” information these alt-right geniuses find so alarming is a study analyzing the effects of Covid-19 vaccine misinformation on a population’s intentions to seek vaccination. It comes from Nature Human Behavior — again, not Nature and not a medical journal per se.

The rest of the Breitbart story is equally ridiculous — publishing a speculative essay is “pushing” an “agenda,” and all that kind of stuff. They also quote sources that agree with them without naming them, making it possible these pithy thoughts were simply invented by the writers and put in quotes to create a false sense of consensus.

This all seems part of an anti-vaccine/vaccine injury/unvaccinated exploitation gambit, one started by Wakefield in 1998, with its contours becoming clearer with each passing day:

• Sow doubts about vaccines, make money off books and media as you do
  • Argue that efforts to sideline these claims violate “free speech” principles, even for private entities
• Claim naturally occurring diseases are the result of a plot emanating from secretive elite cabals — a lab leak, a bioweapon
  • This step just got a major boost from the alt-right Trump Administration, which on Friday declared Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak, full stop.
    • From the WaPo story: “Democrats and scientists countered that the Trump administration has embraced unproven claims to attack scientists and the institutions that support them.”
• Create a false narrative about widespread vaccine injury using misleading interpretations of VAERS data, suggestive survey protocols, preprints intended to drive undisclosed political and commercial interests, and endless media appearances of the same sympathetic few to humanize everything
• Sell unproven, unregulated treatments — vitamins, minerals, juices — to “treat” unvaccinated people who contract preventable diseases while exploiting people misled into believing they have suffered a vaccine injury event, despite these actually being exceedingly rare

To kick off what seems likely to become another withering campaign of intimidation, ignorance, lawlessness, and cruelty, last week the US Attorney for the District of Columbia sent Orwellian letters to various journals seeking to goad them into some kind of trap.

The New York Times did a great job covering this Friday afternoon, with yours truly quoted. Other coverage appeared in the Washington Post and Forbes.

The Times reporters also unearthed this relevant quote from a 2024 podcast video of RFK Jr. threatening scientific and medical journals:

I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws. . . . I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries.

In March, DOGE started cutting scientific journal subscriptions.

At the same time, anti-vaxxers grifting off these issues have started their own OA “journals,” seeking to appropriate the goodwill of legitimate journals while pushing unscientific claims through sham peer-review. By attacking legitimate journals as unwilling to consider “alternative perspectives” — even punishing them commercially and politically for sticking to the science — these grifters and their political enablers can muddy the waters sufficiently to let their dirty deeds go unnoticed, while undermining legitimate science and scientific outputs.

Their overall goal appears to be: Make science = politics.

If science is just a political stance — a “what you believe in” program — then anything can be science, and the winners are those who can convince more people of their particular view, with no need to expend effort comporting with objective reality, compiling evidence, or establishing facts.

• For an infuriatingly excellent portrait of how misaligned with reality RFK Jr. and his anti-vaccine coterie have become, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest podcast about the rotavirus vaccine is the ticket.

For science to become debatable at the level they want, first you have to make people believe science is already a way of lying and deceiving others so the “elites” can gain advantages. You have to dehumanize scientists and delegitimize science, bring it down to the level of opinion and “perspectives.”

This isn’t new, which is not reassuring. An editorial in Nature from 2010 noted the rising anti-science movement in right-wing politics, with Rush Limbaugh painting the targets:

The four corners of deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.

In 2005, Chris Mooney published a book (The Republican War on Science) detailing 20 years of attacks on science from the political right. A review of the book in Nature was entitled, “The wake-up call.”

This was 20 years ago, mind you.

Rip Van Winkle would just now be rousing himself . . .

In 2019, Sarah Rosenfeld wrote in Democracy and Truth: A Short History:

. . . ordinary people can, in response to long-simmering resentment, gradually stop putting any stock in expert voices of any kind, seeing all of them as hacks or phonies speaking only for themselves and their partisan, financially interested cronies. That’s when facts start to look indistinguishable from opinions or beliefs, the former appearing as just a disguised manifestation of the latter. That’s also when the way becomes clear for a demagogic outsider who, with the help of alternative media like far-right news sources that spring up to aid the process with conspiracy theories and vituperation directed against enemies, promises to elevate “the people” over all sources of knowledge, from universities to major newspapers to beholden politicians, who can be said to be complicit in elite, technocractic rule.

The right-wing’s anti-science movement stretches far back. Add white nationalists (who like preprints, by the way) and eugenics — something Elon Musk seems to be dabbling in, and something Jeffrey Epstein also sought — and there’s a rich history of fatuous popinjays on the hateful, anti-science side of town.

Now, they’re “inside the house,” blowing through laws and trying to warp guardrails such as journals. It’s worth remembering that part of the reason journals with independent review exist is because scientists didn’t want politicians choosing which papers were good and which were not.

One writer has compared today’s moment to the era when Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko began degrading Soviet scientific capabilities, all with Stalin’s backing. His system elevated pseudoscience, crippled Russian science for decades, and caused misery for millions.

We didn’t wake up 20 years ago. Now, we’re being attacked for being “woke.” But are we awake?

The absence of journal publishers going on the record with the New York Times last Friday has me worried.

United, we stand. Divided, we fall — taking all the people and the nation we serve with us.

Have we truly awakened to these threats to science? Or are we just prevaricating and pretending?