At Spiked! Online, physician and writer Cory Franklin asks a bold question: “Can science journalism get over its Trump Derangement Syndrome?”, charging that “Once venerated magazines like Scientific American have traded scientific rigour for woke agitprop”:

A recent op-ed, titled ‘How feminism can guide climate change by action’, demonstrates how completely off the rails this once prestigious magazine has gone. To say the article is simply ‘bad science’ would not be accurate. There is no science in it at all. Here is a small sample:

‘Feminism gives us the analysis, tools and movement to create a better climate future… Climate policymaking needs to take into account the expertise that women, including indigenous and rural women, bring to bear on issues like preserving ecosystems and environmentally sustainable agriculture… We must redistribute resources away from male-dominated, environmentally harmful economic activities towards those prioritising women’s employment, regeneration and care for both people and ecosystems.’ February 6, 2025

It seems that the departure late last year of editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth amid a flurry of angry social media posts about the recent U.S. election, which saw Donald Trump elected President, has not changed the focus of the magazine much. Franklin charges,

Not content with publishing woke, unscientific nonsense, Scientific American has at times been little more than a mouthpiece for progressive and government orthodoxies. During the pandemic, it published multiple articles supposedly ‘debunking’ the lab-leak theory – now all but accepted by the majority of Western governments. It even trashed the Cass Review, which highlighted the lack of scientific evidence for the treatments given out to young people by Britain’s gender-identity services. February 6, 2025

Franklin, author of THE COVID DIARIES: 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened (2024) warns, regarding the descent of Scientific American and other science publications into fashionable Woke politics: “The fall of Scientific American proves that the old truism – that when you introduce science into politics, you are left only with politics – works just as well in the reverse. Science will struggle to recover from these attempts to politicise it.”

Last November, I noted that many scitech writers also hate Trump advisor Elon Musk, dumping on his visionary ideas, like a Mars base. Imagine scitech writers dumping on the idea of a Mars base! They certainly did not used to be like that. But it may be that they are so habituated to a certain type of politics that they can only see science in those terms now. No question, that is a loss.