Clutch your pearls and fall on the fainting couch. The editor-in-chief of Science Magazine, the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has written a political editorial! To wit:
This may be the most shameful moment in the history of U.S. science policy.
In an interview with Woodward on 7 February 2020, Trump said he knew that COVID-19 was more lethal than the flu and that it spread through the air. “This is deadly stuff,” he said. But on 9 March, he tweeted that the “common flu” was worse than COVID-19, while economic advisor Larry Kudlow and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway assured the public that the virus was contained. On 19 March, Trump told Woodward that he did not want to level with the American people about the danger of the virus. “I wanted to always play it down,” he said, “I still like playing it down.” Playing it down meant lying about the fact that he knew the country was in grave danger. It also meant silencing health officials who tried to tell the truth.. . . Trump was not clueless, and he was not ignoring the briefings. Listen to his own words. Trump lied, plain and simple.
Okay, that's bad I guess. You know, 200,000 dead and counting. But with the western U.S. in flames and a historic Atlantic hurricane season in progress, there's this:
“It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch,” Trump said after Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, urged him and others not to “put our head in the sand” and simply ignore the warming climate. . . . But Crowfoot responded: “I wish science agreed with you.”
Trump, with a smirk, shot back: “OK, well, I don’t think science knows, actually.”
And the virus will just magically go away. It's like a miracle. This insane idiot is murdering people. By the thousands and hundreds of thousands. And if you don't understand that you are equally delusional.
And you can add Scientific American: First political endorsement in 175 years.
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