Laura Helmuth has resigned as editor-in-chief of the 179-year-old publication in the wake of her recent public meltdown triggered by the November 5 election. According to Jordan Valinsky at CNN last Friday,

Posting on Bluesky, an X rival, Helmuth said Thursday that she’s “decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief” without mentioning her previous comments.

In a series of now-deleted posts on the same platform, she called Trump voters the “meanest, dumbest, most bigoted” group and “fascists” following the former president’s reelection last week. Her comments went viral on X and were criticized on the increasingly right-wing platform.

“Editor-in-chief of America’s oldest magazine resigns after calling Trump voters fascists”

Here are the widely-circulated posts (profanity warning).

Professional skeptic Michael Shermer had this to say about the general direction of the magazine under Helmuth’s leadership in “An Unscientific American,” an article at Quillette yesterday: “The ideological capture of the publication began years before Laura Helmuth took the helm in 2020, as I documented in my first Skeptic Substack column.“

He offers examples from recent years, including

In “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” (5 July 2021), author Allison Hopper asserts that creationists are ipso facto white supremacists because in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, Cain is punished for his fratricide by “a darkening of his descendants’ skin.” However, this is not how mainstream creationists interpret that passage and, indeed, polls consistently show a larger percentage of blacks than whites hold creationist beliefs, motivated in this by religious faith, not racism.

and

“The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong” (1 November 2023) ignores the fact that a comprehensive overview of all studies has shown that only 6–16 percent of hunter-gatherer societies “show signs of female hunting with any regularity” and that “even in societies where women hunt, they hunt to a much lesser extent than do men.” The authors extrapolate from the almost certainly false idea that prehistoric women hunted as much as men did to the conclusion that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” This is pure blank slate pablum, which can be controverted by a single observation: As she herself has admitted, Serena Williams would not be able to beat any of the top 100 male tennis players.

He concludes

Does anyone actually believe such things? It seems some do and Laura Helmuth appears to be one of them. That is the most charitable assessment I can make of what has happened to the publication that inspired a dozen generations of budding scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians, and scholars. As in other science publications, along with mainstream media outlets, some corporations, and nearly all academic institutions, the people promulgating these woke ideas are mostly true believers—and the fervour of their faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves of the truth of claims that everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality. Men do not menstruate and cannot get pregnant; women do not have penises and do not produce sperm; and transwomen—who are men—do not belong in women’s sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, prisons, or any other spaces designated for women only. No amount of ideological wishful thinking will change this.

This could well be the topic of his next book. Skeptics are rarely as blunt as this about Woke delusions. Perhaps many of them prefer less established targets. He could be about to change that.