Science Is Dead, Long Live Politics

Friday, December 12, 2025

In 2020 I noted “The Sad Death of A Once Great Magazine” as Scientific American did what no self-respecting science magazine should do – endorse a presidential candidate.  I concluded “Specialty journalism is officially dead – consumed by politics.”  Covid was, of course, involved in the discussion at the time wherein everyone hid behind “the science” and no one had or knew any actual science.  No longer is it merely specialty journalism that is consumed by politics, it is science itself.

Consider these four headline I have culled in the few days preceding:

• Environmental group sues in bid to get Trump’s image removed from new national park passes
• UN environment report ‘hijacked’ by US and others over fossil fuels, top scientist says
• Burgum calls California a ‘national security risk’ as Energy chief warns blue states are skewing cost averages
• Revenge of the Climate Realists

These are all political stories about things that are essentially scientific.  Environment, climate, energy – these are scientific pursuits and yet these articles are about who actually gets to say what is science – a political argument, not a data based argument.  And one of them is just petty.

Politics has been consuming everything for a few decades now, but it was held for the first decade or so of that period that one could still study science and not be propagandized, but that is no longer the case.  How we got here is easy enough to explain – money.

Researching science takes money and the government has gradually put itself in the position of being the primary provider of such.  And thus you have to do the science the government wants – whatever is the hot topic of debate of the day.  And since the media is in Democrat hands, you better get the results Democrats demand or else your work never sees the light of day.  Sadly, in the end, it is all about money.

This reached a zenith during covid when “science” was used to justify turning on money spigots to the point of immense and overwhelming fraud.  Make no mistake, when history is done with covid it is going to come down to money and power – “excess deaths” and other scientific measures of the pandemic will appear no where in the paragraph that the history books will devote to it.  It will be the history of a small group of bureaucrats seeking control – control that would eventually enrich them.

Science is not a field of study, it is a way of studying.  Despite efforts to make it so, that method of study does not work equally well in all areas of intellectual pursuit.  But in the end it is a way to seek knowledge that should be devoted to reason and absent human frailty.  It is supposed to be about numbers, not perception.  But as we have attempted to apply the methodology in fields where it is ill-suited, instead of learning it was ill-suited to the field, we have learned to manipulate the numbers to make it look like it is.  Put simply human frailty has overridden what we thought was our unshakable reason.

Just another example of why we need what begins at Christmas and ends at Easter.

IMPORTANT POSTSCRIPT: Please do not under any circumstances forget that this past weekend, on a football field, Indiana University defeated THE Ohio State University for the Big Ten championship.  That’s football, not basketball, and its Indiana winning, not Michigan.  Just sayin’.