The Actual War on Science
Mark Honeychurch - 13th October 2025
Recently a group of well-known scientists and academics, some of whom were once regular speakers at Skeptics conferences around the world, published a book called “The War on Science”. Collated by physicist Lawrence Krauss, the 39 essays in the book are written by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, Peter Boghossian, Niall Ferguson, Alan Sokal and Gad Saad.
You would be forgiven for thinking that this collection of essays, which came out in July this year, would focus on the hugely destructive policies being implemented by Donald Trump in the first year of his second term as President of the USA. Thousands of scientists have been speaking out online about their dismay that important institutions have been dismantled, research programmes defunded, key roles disestablished and many staff members summarily fired.
Driving these changes are some of Donald Trump’s more baffling appointments to senior government roles, where his choices seem to be driven more by name recognition than qualifications or proven track records - in fact, many of those Trump has picked appear to have serious issues that, in an ideal world, would make them ineligible for the roles they’ve been given. Here are just some of Trump’s most egregious staffing decisions:
RFK Jr - Secretary of Health
Robert F Kennedy Junior is a dangerous crank - I really can’t think of a more subtle way of saying it than that. His anti-vaccine stance is well-known, and likely to result in injury and death in the coming years in the US. But he also has weird views on autism and its causes (including not just vaccines but also environmental toxins, paracetamol and circumcision), mass shootings (apparently caused by antidepressants), cancer (he thinks WiFi can cause cancer), HIV/AIDS (he doesn’t think they’re connected) and transgenderism (he thinks there’s something in the water supply turning kids trans).
RFK Jr has also been replacing well-credentialed experts within the Department of Health and Human Services with unqualified activists who are undermining the work that the department does.
The problem with RFK Jr has become so serious that six former Surgeons General have recently jointly penned a warning saying that RFK Jr has “rejected science, misled the public and compromised the health of Americans”.
Mehmet Oz - Head of Medicare & Medicaid
TV personality Dr Oz had a history on his TV show of promoting unproven herbal and alternative treatments, to the point that in 2014 he was summoned to a Senate hearing and warned about his behaviour:
I won’t go into more detail about Dr Oz, as I’m sure most skeptics are well aware of just how much damage he’s done to public health literacy.
Casey Means - Surgeon General
Casey Means is currently awaiting confirmation as the new Surgeon General. She is a functional medicine practitioner and wellness influencer who uses social media to sell “sponsored dietary supplements, creams, teas, and other products”, according to Wikipedia.
Casey was nominated after Trump’s previous nomination, Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, was found to have lied about her degree, military service and more. Janette has written a book, “Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine”, about the power of prayer, and sells BC Boost, her own brand of unproven dietary supplement.
Jay Bhattacharya - Director of the NIH
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, who at least seems to be somewhat academic - having worked at Stanford University, made a name for himself during the early days of COVID when he attempted to downplay the seriousness of the disease. He is one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that argued that “focused protection” would be a better solution to COVID than lockdowns - an idea that was roundly criticised by many scientists, including 80 signatories to a response titled the John Snow Memorandum. Jay is currently the Director of the National Institutes of Health.
Chris Wright - Secretary of Energy
Chris Wright, the new US Secretary of Energy, has a long history of working with fossil fuel companies, and is something of a climate denier. As Wikipedia says:
As Secretary of Energy, Wright has supported the rollback of measures to combat climate change and overseen the crafting of a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report questioning mainstream climate science. In an interview with Kimberley Strassel, Wright said that “too little” atmospheric carbon dioxide is a “bigger risk” than rising CO2 levels. He falsely claimed that climate change is not impacting extreme weather events. Wright’s statements and the DOE report have been widely condemned by the scientific community for misrepresentations and cherry-picked data.
In September 2025, Wright wrote on social media platform X that solar power cannot meet global energy demands and that covering the entire planet in solar panels would only provide 20% of demand. The statement was characterised by New Scientist as “wildly and embarrassingly wrong” as covering only 0.3% of land would be required to provide 100% of global energy demand.
Elon Musk - Department of Government Efficiency
Although no longer working for the government, Elon’s efforts during his time at the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to streamline government and reduce spending ended up being more of a hatchet job than a surgical procedure. This included ham-fisted cuts to biomedical research, space exploration, education and more.
On top of this there are countless other picks Donald Trump has made where it’s obvious at a glance that the nominees are totally unfit for the job they’ve been nominated for, including several Fox News hosts and other TV personalities.
Back to the War on Science
What does the book “The War on Science” have to say about these appointments? Absolutely nothing. According to the book’s many authors, Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies are what’s threatening scientific progress in the USA today. No, I’m not over-dramatising things here - here’s what the Amazon blurb for the book says:
“From assaults on merit-based hiring to the policing of language and replacing well-established, disciplinary scholarship by ideological mantras, current science and scholarship is under threat throughout western institutions. As this group of prominent scholars ranging across many different disciplines and political leanings detail, the very future of free inquiry and scientific progress is at risk.”
Now, I don’t doubt for a second that DEI is not perfect - any system that is designed to correct an imbalance is likely to over-correct in some instances, and I think it’s fine to critique any excesses that may occur. But, looking at reviews of this book, it appears that the aim of these authors is not to helpfully point out where DEI has sometimes gone wrong; instead, they’ve decided that the entire effort to redress institutional biases is misguided at best, and should be scrapped. To me it seems like they’re attempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What’s telling as well is that many of these authors appear to have been personally affected in their careers by what they consider to be “progressive” policies, and their attempts to take a stand against them - from advice about being considerate of people from ethnically diverse backgrounds, though rules about sexual relationships with students, and all the way to laws against sexual harassment. So it seems likely that for many of these authors, most of whom are known to be extremely conservative in their political views (despite the claim that the authors range across political leanings), this disdain for DEI appears to be personal rather than professional.
Not only do I think these authors are making a mountain out of a molehill (especially compared to the actual mountain of bad staffing decisions within the US government), there’s another critique of this book that I think probably should have stopped it being published at all. These 39 academics are claiming, as of the book’s release in July this year, that DEI in US universities is undermining science. In reality, many of these universities have already been forced to remove their DEI policies under duress, pressured by threats of defunding or legal action.
Of course, work on the book was started before Trump’s second presidency, as Wikipedia can confirm, so when these essays were written none of the things I’ve described above had yet happened:
In 2024, Krauss edited the book The War on Science, a collection of essays from 39 academics addressing perceived threats to academic freedom and scientific progress, such as DEI programs, wokeness, and cancel culture.
I guess it took a year or so to sort out a publisher, etc, but in the intervening time it probably would have been good for Krauss, or some of the other authors, to do a quick stocktake of the political situation in the US. Given everything that’s transpired since January this year, it probably would have been wise to have either cut their losses and decide not to publish at all, or maybe try to add some balance by adding a few new articles detailing the current crisis within government-funded science in the US, and its global repercussions.
Now the book’s been released, I’m not sure how well the it’s doing - but I suspect it’s not selling many copies. The book is published by Post Hill Press, but no matter how much I browsed the publisher’s site I couldn’t find The War on Science listed anywhere - not in the Bestsellers section, the New Releases section, or the Political Nonfiction section. Eventually I found it somewhere in the middle of the big list of all 1,421 books Post Hill has published.
Although it seems like this publisher isn’t keen to mention that they’re responsible for the release of this book, there are other books that they’re loud and proud about publishing - like Charlie Kirk’s “Time for a Turning Point”, Kash Patel’s “Government Gangsters”, and many other books with a clear right-wing agenda, as well as many, many overtly Christian books such as “The Two Swords of Christ”, “One Nation Under God”, “Christian Patriot” and “Culture Jihad”.
It seems that a second publisher, Swift Press, is also publishing this book. Swift Press has a much smaller line-up of books than Post Hill Press does, but the books’ themes look similar - conservative views covering many of the usual talking-points such as “gender ideology”, racism, Islam, reparations, feminism and climate change.
I wonder how the authors featured in “The War on Science” feel about the fact that the best publishers they could find for their book are responsible for spreading so much misinformation from the Christian Right in the US? Is it worth having such awful bedfellows, just so that you have a chance to air your personal grievances? I’m not sure I could swallow a pill that bitter.
If you want to know more about the authors and their grievances, and you have a spare four hours, you can watch the following video. Shaun does a great job of breaking down why many of the claims in the book are not the whole truth, and even manages to briefly cover the Mātauranga Māori issue and the Listener Letter (at around 2:36):