President Barack Obama slammed real estate mogul Donald Trump for supposedly not believing in science – even though this is something that Obama himself is guilty of.
In a commencement address at Rutgers University, Obama said in a snarky tone, “Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy…We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from.”
The irony, of course, is that Obama doesn’t exactly practice what he preaches. Here are five ways in which Obama denies science.
1. Back in 2008, Obama suggested there was a link between vaccines and autism. During an April 2008 rally, Obama said, “We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included [Obama reportedly pointed to an audience member here].” Obama continued, “The science is right now inconclusive, but we have to research it.”
Politico tried to spin it by suggesting that the context was unclear if Obama was referring only to rising autism rates or if there was a connection between autism and vaccines, but it’s obvious in the video that he’s referring to a link between autism and vaccines, since Obama later says, “Part of the reason I think it’s very important to research it is that vaccines are also preventing huge numbers of deaths among children and preventing debilitating illnesses like polio, uh, so we can’t afford to junk our vaccine system. We’ve got to figure out why is it that this is happening so that we are starting to see a more normal–what was a normal–rate of autism because if we keep seeing increases in the rate that we’re seeing, we’re never going to have enough money to provide the special needs, special education money that’s going to be necessary.”
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, the research on vaccines proving they are effective and perfectly safe is sound. The notion that there is a link between vaccines and autism was based on a study that used falsified data.
Today, Obama claims to believe that vaccines are safe, but his statement in 2008 shows that he’s capable of letting pseudo-science trump science.
2. Obama believes that life doesn’t begin at conception, or even outside of the womb. Obama is an extremist on the issue of abortion. He has openly defended infanticide. In 2003 Obama argued against the Born Alive legislation – a law that defended children who survived abortions – when he was in the Illinois state senate. Obama’s extreme position is based on the premise that life doesn’t begin at conception, which flies in the face of science.
Here are prominent scientists who have testified in front of the Senate saying that life begins at conception, via the National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children (NAAPC):
- “I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception…. I submit that human life is present throughout this entire sequence from conception to adulthood and that any interruption at any point throughout this time constitutes a termination of human life…I am no more prepared to say that these early stages [of development in the womb] represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty…is not a human being. This is human life at every stage.”–Dr. Alfred Bongioanni, University of Pennsylavania professor of pediatrics and obstetrics.
- “It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive…. It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception…Our laws, one function of which is to help preserve the lives of our people, should be based on accurate scientific data.”–Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth, Harvard University Medical School.
- “The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter—the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political, or economic goals.”–Dr. Watson Bowes, University of Colorado Medical School.
- “After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being.”–Dr. Jerome LeJeune, University of Descartes in Paris professor of genetics who discovered “the chromosome pattern in Down Syndrome.”
There are also at least 41 medical textbooks that prove that life begins at conception, including the National Institutes of Health, which defines fertilization as “the somatic chromosome number is restored and the development of a new individual is initiated.”
3. Obama sneers at anyone who believes that man-made climate change is a myth, even though the science is actually against the global warming alarmist crowd. Back in 2013, Obama treated climate change skeptics with derision and scorn.
“We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat-Earth Society,” Obama said. “Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.”
Ironically, the Flat-Earth Society believes in man-made global warming.
“The planet is warming. Human activity is contributing to it,” Obama said, touting the myth that a consensus of scientists believe in man-made climate change. “We know that the costs of these events can be measured in lost lives and lost livelihoods.”
Obama also said that “that the 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come within the last 15 years, and said that rising temperatures were increasing the severity and impact of storms.”
This is all completely false, as there has been an 18-year pause in warming, and the frequency and severity of storms have actually been declining, not rising.
In actuality, the science shows that rising temperatures results in higher levels of carbon dioxide, not the other way around, as demonstrated by the following videos:
Professor Mike van Biezen has a comprehensive takedown of the man-made climate change myth here.
4. Obama thinks that people can arbitrarily change their gender, even though it is biologically impossible to do so. Last week, the Obama administration issued a letter threatening public schools with revoking federal funds if they didn’t allow men to pee in women’s bathrooms and vice versa.
“A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so,” the letter states. The letter also made it clear that schools cannot require a medical diagnosis for a person to use a bathroom of their choice.
The absurdity of the letter’s premise can be seen in their definition of “gender identity,” which “refers to an individual’s internal sense of gender. A person’s gender identity may be different from or the same as the person’s sex assigned at birth.” The letter defines a transgender male as ” someone who identifies as male but was assigned the sex of female at birth.” The key word in both cases is the word “assigned,” implying that gender is nothing more than a homework assignment given out by a teacher and is therefore a fluid construct. The science, however, proves otherwise.
According to The Federalist, gender reassignment began under the guidance of Dr. Harry Benjamin in the 1970s. The leading doctor in his clinic for the surgeries was Dr. Charles Ihlenfeld, who was gay, and came to the following conclusion after performing around 500 transgender surgeries: “Whatever surgery did, it did not fulfill a basic yearning for something that is difficult to define. This goes along with the idea that we are trying to treat superficially something that is much deeper.”
Dr. Paul McHugh at John Hopkins Hospital had similar findings after the institute stopped performing sex-change operations.
“Gender dysphoria — the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite s — ex — belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder,” McHugh explained in an article for The Witherspoon Institute. “Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction.”
McHugh continues, “All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they ‘identify.’ In that lies their problematic future.”
The scientist noted that suicide rates among those who had gender reassignment surgery were 20 times higher after 10-15 years than those in similar circumstances who did not.
There is an abundance of research that confirms these finds; The Federalist highlights the following from the UK Guardian:
There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend tomorrow.
The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham’s aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective.
As well as this:
A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in March 2016 shows a high prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses in a sample of 298 young transgender women aged 16 through 29 years. More than 40 percent had coexisting mental health or substance dependence diagnoses. One in five had two or more psychiatric diagnoses. The most commonly occurring disorders were major depressive episode, suicidality, generalized anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, alcohol dependence, and non-alcohol psychoactive substance use dependence.
The study concluded that improved access to medical and psychological care “are urgently needed to address mental health and substance dependence disorders in this population.”
The science therefore is sound: It is biologically impossible for people to change their gender identity. But Obama won’t let facts and science obstruct his mission to fundamentally transform America’s bathrooms.
5. Obama thinks that advances in medicine can be brought about through funding embryonic stem cells rather than adult stem cells. Back in 2009, Obama issued an executive order allowing federal funding for further research into embryonic stem cell treatment. Not only does his directive gloss over the ethical problems with embryonic stem cells — as many view them as potential human life — but completely ignores the problems of embryonic stem cells when put to medicinal use:
First, one minor complication is that use of human embryonic stem cells requires lifelong use of drugs to prevent rejection of the tissue. Second, another more serious disadvantage is that using embryonic stem cells can produce tumors from rapid growth when injected into adult patients. A third disadvantage reported in the March 8, 2001, New England Journal of Medicine was of tragic side effects from an experiment involving the insertion of fetal brain cells into the brains of Parkinson’s disease patients. Results included uncontrollable movements: writhing, twisting, head jerking, arm-flailing, and constant chewing. Fourth, a recent report in the Journal Science reported that mice cloned from ESC were genetically defective. If human ESC are also genetically unstable, that could materially compromise efforts to transform cells extracted from embryos into successful medical therapies. Finally, the research may be hampered because many of the existing stem cell lines were grown with the necessary help of mouse cells. If any of this research is to turn into treatments, it will need approval from the FDA, which requires special safeguards to prevent transmission of animal diseases to people. It is unclear how many of these cell lines were developed with the safeguards in place. This leads to a host of problems related to transgenic issues.
Adult stem cells, on the other hand, don’t carry the same ethical issues since they’re simply cells “that divide to replenish dying cells and regenerate damaged tissues.” They also have better potential for medical research than embryonic stem cells do, as demonstrated in a story in the UK Telegraph where doctors were able to cure blindness in 12 babies.
“An ultimate goal of stem cell research is to turn on the regenerative potential of one’s own stem cells for tissue and organ repair and disease therapy,” Dr Kang Zhang, chief of Ophthalmic Genetics and founding director of UC San Diego’s Institute for Genomic Medicine, told the Telegraph. “The success of this work represents a new approach in how new human tissue or organ can be regenerated and human disease can be treated, and may have a broad impact on regenerative therapies by harnessing the regenerative power of our own body.”
Yet, Obama chose to provide more federal funding for the less scientifically viable option and ignore adult stem cells altogether. This is not a man who is interested in adhering to science, as he’s only interested in promoting his hard-left ideology.
