🔒 Lawrence Krauss' Race Science Problem

So I’m going to talk about this book again.

 I wasn’t going to, because my whole thing was that I could review it accurately without ever reading it. But more has come to light since it was actually released, and that is that somebody did read it. Namely, a popular YouTuber who has been posting video essays for a decade under the mononym “Shaun.”

 His video about The War on Science is just over four hours long if you have that kind of time, and  yes it did reaffirm most of my suspicions about it, but also, right toward the end, in the last half hour, Shaun discovers something that just hadn’t occurred to me at the time: In order to sell his soul out to the “anti-woke” science community, Lawrence Krauss has had to get into bed with some serious fucking ghouls. I’m talking, of course, about the skull-measurers.

So I got a copy of the damn book. I make money from this newsletter so I can legally deduct it from my tax as research material. But this was a mistake already—I got scammed on this. The book I bought is missing around a full third of the chapters that appear in the book that Shaun reviewed. I have never seen this kind of bullshit before. I had to re-check that I actually purchased the official book from the official Amazon page. I got the Kindle version, which I rarely do because I hate ebooks, but I don’t need this garbage taking up physical space in my house.

 Is that a thing, with ebooks? That sometimes you get a heavily redacted version of the paper edition? Has this ever happened to anyone?

 So yeah, see Shaun’s video if you want the long review—I am unable to review it myself because I don’t have the whole fucking book I paid for.

 I’ll mention at this point that Lawrence Krauss used to be an idol of mine back when I used to buy New Scientist magazine every week and he would often appear as a columnist. Then he was credibly accused of a lot of sexual misconduct and suddenly became this huge antifeminist, “anti-woke” guy, completely by coincidence, fighting against the supposed leftist takeover of science.

 Here’s the thing: When you try to pivot to the right on science, as a scientist, you run into some problems—namely that the science agrees with the left on most of the topics that have been decided, for some reason, to be “political.”

I don’t mean there aren’t any right-wing scientists who are experts and correct in their field. Obviously you can be a field-leading expert on Planck’s quantum radiation law while also hating immigrants or whatever. It’s only within specific areas of sociopolitical overlap where right-wing scientists have to decide whether they’re going to side with the science or dismiss it as conspiracy and align instead with a fringe that better describes what they prefer to be true about the world.

 Whenever you encounter “anti-woke” science, it inevitably falls into one or more of these four categories:

- Rejection of climate science;
- Rejection of vaccine science or germ theory in its entirety;
- Rejection of gender theory;
- Or, perhaps most insidious and also our topic today: Pseudoscientific race bullshit.

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