The science of voting for Kamala Harris

Toby Young

The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. She is the candidate that anyone who cares about science should vote for, apparently. Her positions on issues such as ‘the climate crisis’, ‘public health’ and ‘reproductive rights’ are ‘lit by rationality’ and based on ‘reality’, ‘science’ and ‘solid evidence’, while her opponent ‘rejects evidence’ in favour of ‘nonsensical conspiracy fantasies’.

There’s something a bit odd about a science magazine getting embroiled in the grubby world of politics

On the face of it, there’s something a bit odd about a storied science magazine getting embroiled in the grubby world of politics. Indeed, the editorial acknowledges how unusual this is, suggesting that’s all the more reason we should take the recommendation seriously. The editors have descended from Mount Olympus because the fate of America – nay, the world – is at stake: ‘That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president.’ True, the previous occasion was only four years ago when it endorsed Joe Biden, but the editors have a point. It is rather unorthodox.

So how can science tell us how to vote? My admittedly primitive understanding of the history of science is that it only really began to transform our understanding of the world when a firm distinction emerged between fact and value – between descriptive propositions, which depict the world as it is, and prescriptive ones, which tell us how it ought to be. That is, the Scientific Revolution occurred when students of nature eschewed politics and religion and embraced reason and empiricism. In that context, the editors of Scientific American, in seeking to muddy those waters again, seem to want to return to an era in which the evidence of our senses – ‘reality’, as they put it – tells us how to behave. In defiance of the naturalistic fallacy, they are smashing the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ back together.

This seems a little unwise, to put it mildly. If believing in ‘the science’ means you have to vote Democrat, how are you going to persuade Republicans to embrace your ‘evidence-based’ policy on, say, Roe vs Wade? A paper in Nature Human Behaviour last year found that the endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 by Nature, the prestigious science journal, caused Trump supporters to distrust the publication, lowered the demand for Covid-related information it published (i.e. downloads of articles on the efficacy of the Covid vaccines fell substantially) and reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. I can’t quite get my head around just how stupid this is. It’s a bit like a group of evangelical Christians telling potential converts that if they vote Democrat they’ll go straight to hell. If you’re in the proselytising business, as Scientific American clearly is, it seems a bit daft to alienate roughly half the US population.

There’s also the fact that, in the event of Trump winning, he’ll be more likely to cut federal spending on scientific research and public health. In fact, this is one of the reasons given by Scientific American to vote for Kamala, but talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! After all, why would Trump give billions of dollars to a community that’s aligned itself with his opponent? Wouldn’t it be more prudent for these panjandrums of the scientific establishment to remain above the political fray?

One explanation of why the editors of these high-profile science publications are behaving in such a bizarre way is that they’re just partisan hacks, determined to persuade people to vote Democrat. According to this theory, they don’t really believe science has anything meaningful to say about who to vote for – how could it? They’re just pretending it does to gull their less sophisticated readers into supporting Kamala.

But I don’t buy that. More likely, I fear, is that the editors of Scientific American really do believe in the snake oil they’re selling. It’s not science they’re committed to, but scientism – a weird hybrid of technocratic managerialism and radical progressive ideology. If the modern era was made possible by the separation of knowledge and morality, the worshippers at this new altar seem determined to usher in a new post-modern utopia in which science and religion are fused once again. In that light, they cannot help but endorse Harris because their consciences won’t allow them to do otherwise. It’s not a choice dictated by science, but by theology. Trump, who gleefully trespasses over their sacred values, is the devil and they must stop him. The title of their magazine should be changed to Scientistic Americans.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-science-of-voting-for-kamala-harris/

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The Harris Campaign Is Pure Run-Out-the-Clock Cynicism

Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris—ever since President Joe Biden, at the 11th hour, dropped out in July.

Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked.

Her single, 11-minute postdebate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating—even though the host was sympathetically left-wing.

Even socialist Bernie Sanders pointed out that for Harris to get elected, she must temporarily disown her lifelong leftist credentials.

As vice president, she must further deny co-ownership of the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration.

Left unstated is that whether she wins the presidency—or loses it and continues as vice president for another three months—nonetheless she will inevitably revert back to her hard-core, lifelong leftist beliefs.

In addition, Harris has reconstructed her privileged upbringing as a child of two PhDs, living in a posh Montreal neighborhood into a struggling, middle-class Oakland childhood.

How can she stage such a complete makeover—and contemptuously count on the voting public to be so easily deceived?

She avoids all news conferences, one-on-one nationally broadcast interviews, and town halls. And like Biden, she will debate only on leftist venues with impartial pro-Harris moderators.

When asked to provide the details of her past responsibility for the open border, inflationary economy, spiraling crime, attacks on fossil fuels, and collapsing foreign policy, Harris smiles, makes hand gestures, and dodges. She changes the subject to her empathetic personality, her “joy” campaign, and her iconic profile as a supposedly dynamic black woman.

When pressed, Harris outsources the task of squaring her hypocrisies and subterfuges to the stonewalling campaign, Democratic surrogates—and the media.

Harris is also certainly not running on her demonstrable experience, vision, or intelligence as much as she is not Donald Trump (or, for that matter, her former partner, Biden).

To make that distinction stark, Harris must demonize and bait Trump nonstop and make the country fear him.

So, she paints Trump as a racist and violent insurrectionist, not a former president whose four-year term saw a superior foreign policy, economy, border, and security than during the Biden-Harris term.

Instead, Harris has repeatedly claimed Trump is a dictator and a threat to democracy—as if he had politically weaponized the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, or IRS as had former President Barack Obama and Biden.

Trump as Hitler has become a staple Democrat smear for the past decade.

That vicious caricature is so entrenched that major Democratic figures assume it’s OK to joke about, or seriously call for, Trump’s demise.

So, Harris’ current prominent adviser David Plouffe years ago warned the nation that “it is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

Just last year, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., claimed that Trump “is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be, he has to be eliminated.”

Even after an assassin sought to kill Trump last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025. We must stop them.”

Harris’ dehumanizing of Trump, outsourcing the campaign to the media, avoiding all public dialogue, and temporarily reinventing one’s politics and biography have taken a toll on the country.

Harris was coronated the Democratic candidate without ever entering a primary or winning a single delegate by vote. Some 14 million Democrat primary voters were reduced to irrelevancy.

Like the 2020 Biden campaign, Harris has nationalized a new kind of cynical campaign in which leftist candidates seek for a few months to deceive the public into thinking they are centrist and moderate—until elected.

Avoiding all cross-examination and outsourcing the campaign to the obsequious media is now the new norm.

Most news stories deemed unhelpful to Harris—the left-wing, pro-Harris politics of the recent would-be Trump assassin, the distortion that dozens of bomb threats were called in against Springfield schools by Trump supporters when most, if not all, were perpetrated by foreign actors, or prominent Democrats before and after the recent assassination attempt blaming Trump for being the target of an assassin—are suppressed by the media.

The recent two foiled assassination attempts on Trump logically follow a near-decade pattern of trying to destroy rather than outvote him.

The Russian collusion hoax, the laptop disinformation con, the two impeachments, the effort to remove Trump from some 16 state ballots, and the attempt to jail and bankrupt Trump through five criminal and civil “lawfare” indictments and suits also led to the current hateful climate of Trump assassination attempts.

Harris thinks her delays, deceptions, and vilifications for the next 47 days will ensure her victory.

But if so, it will be because she, her stealth campaign, and her self-proclaimed guardians of democracy have been willing to systematically destroy it.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/20/can-harriss-cynical-run-out-the-clock-campaign-succeed/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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