The Scientific American came out this week with its first presidential endorsement in 175 years, urging its readers to vote for Joe Biden. Donald Trump, claims the publication, “rejects evidence and science,” whereas Biden allegedly “has a record of following the data and being guided by science.”
On the heels of this announcement, Joe Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, tweeted “#VoteForScience.” Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote simply “Science knows.” Many others on the Left and in the media chimed in, hailing Joe Biden as science’s Guardian and Protector, and themselves as its greatest fans.
Biden is glad to play this role. Speaking in Wilmington on Monday, the former vice president spoke about the need to govern according to science. He also said this:
Donald Trump’s climate denial may not have caused these fires and record floods and record hurricanes but if he gets a second term these hellish events will continue to become more common, more devastating, and more deadly… If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires, how many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out, how many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms? If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze? If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is under water?
Leaving aside the fact that the pejorative “climate arsonist” makes even less sense than “climate denier,” Biden here is accusing his political opponent of causing, or at least failing to prevent, fires, floods, and hurricanes. In no uncertain terms, he says that re-electing Donald Trump will mean that your entire neighborhood might be swept away in a superstorm, drowned in floods, or incinerated (hopefully not all at once).
Joe Biden, patron saint of science, apparently believes that there is some sort of physical mechanism by which the President of the United States can actually cause hurricanes to materialize and flood waters to rise. He is not talking about humans merely contributing in some partial way to gradual changes in climate over the course of many decades and centuries. Rather, he is suggesting that one single human on Earth today can, through his own exertions, have a material impact on global weather conditions. When Biden and his supporters speak of “science,” this is what they mean.
But at least Biden’s theory of climate change is slightly less crazy than Nancy Pelosi’s, who recently speculated that wild fires happen because “Mother Earth is angry, she is telling us… the climate crisis is real.” The idea that natural disasters are the result of a displeased Earth goddess may have passed for science among ancient tribes in the year 6,000 BC, but it is a bit outmoded in the modern age. Yet this, again, is what we get from the Party of Science.
The Party of Science also tells us that the child conceived by two human beings and developing in the womb of his mother is not fully human, or not fully person, or not fully alive. As an MSNBC anchor once put it, the answer to when life begins “depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents.” These same custodians and conservators of science say that a male can have a functioning female reproductive system, and a female can have a penis and a Y chromosome. Or perhaps, say the science lovers, a person may have no gender at all. They may be “gender fluid,” possessing no discernible form. Once again: science.
I have personally asked two prominent leftists with doctorates — one a medical doctor, the other a supposed “internationally recognized expert on sexuality” — to define the words “man” and “woman,” and neither of these left-wing science experts with PhDs could do it. Dr. Eugene Gu told me that a man can be defined as “anyone who identifies as a man.” Dr. Logan Levkoff insisted that a “woman” is “anything she wants to be.” The latter answer might make a good inspirational slogan for a guidance counselor’s bulletin board, but it is not science.
Perhaps the situation can be summarized this way: the side of the political aisle that talks the most about science, and most trumpets its own commitment to the methods of science, also believes that it’s possible that a man who is pregnant with a non-human fetus might die in a hurricane caused by the president. That is all that needs to be said to establish that the Party of Science has rather failed to live up to its assumed name.
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