Activist Scientists Rage About Trump’s Executive Order, Comparing Him to Hitler For Insisting That Federally-Funded Science Projects Are More Scientifically Rigorous
by Chris Morrison 2 June 2025 9:00 AM
Activist scientists on the Federal payroll in the United States are reeling from President Trump’s recent executive order designed to promote openness and integrity in an often corrupted and politicised scientific process. The order mandates transparency, objectivity and it provides a protection for dissenting views and safeguards against political interference. Scientific results must be falsifiable, computer models must be explainable and negative results available. Needless to say, not everyone is happy with this return to the “gold standard” with a group of scientists including Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann writing in the Guardian – seemingly without irony – that it will “destroy American science as we know it”. A group called Stand Up for Science, whose executive director also helped write the Guardian article, is collecting signatures noting that “state sponsored” scientific programmes in Nazi Germany led to the deaths of millions of Jews, people with disabilities and people identifying as LGBTQ+.
Of course, the Hitler trope is often deployed when political activists are circling the wagons to defend a way of doing business “as we know it”. In fact, the Trump executive order does no more than provide guidance as to how science should be conducted. It is patently necessary because much of the science produced during the recent Covid panic and in the current fake climate emergency is biased towards promoting the political agenda of an influential, moneyed elite. Even the Guardian finds it hard to quarrel with the new requirement that science produced by Federal employees should be informed by “the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available”. Quite how the newspaper’s writers believe “science is under siege” with an order enshrining such basic scientific principles is not immediately clear.
Over the last five years in the US, public confidence in science has fallen, according to the executive order. In several cases the Federal Government has contributed to this loss of trust. During the pandemic, schools remained closed despite the “best available scientific evidence” showing that children were unlikely to transmit or suffer serious illness or death from the virus. On climate change, agencies have regularly used the RCP 8.5 scenario to produce ‘worst case’ computer model projections. In fact, RCP 8.5 is the basis for most climate and weather fear-mongering. The order notes it is based on highly unlikely assumptions like end-of-century coal use exceeding estimates of recoverable coal reserves. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr has long been a critic of this widespread ‘pathway’, calling its continued misuse, “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the 21st Century so far”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/06/02/activist-scientists-rage-about-trumps-executive-order-comparing-him-to-hitler-for-insisting-that-federally-funded-science-projects-are-more-scientifically-rigorous/
