LACK OF RESPECT FOR SCIENCE: Trump called out by Scientific Journal

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2016/08/20/major-scientific-magazines-editorial-board-just-blasted-trumps-lack-of-respect-for-science/

In July, a Washington Post editorial called Donald Trump “a unique threat to democracy.” This is entirely true. Trump has suggested building a wall to protect from “rapists” and “murderers” Mexico is “sending” to America. He has suggested rounding up members of a religious group, forcing them to be entered into a national database and wear a special little badge, and then be thrown into concentration camps.

Trump has ordered his supporters to beat African-American protesters at his hate rallies, even suggesting that he will pay their legal fees if they are arrested while acting as his attack dogs. Hell,he even kicks his own supporters out of his events if he thinks they might be a little too dark for the room. But award-winning monthly science magazine, Scientific American, wants to remind you that he has about as much respect for science as he does a well-educated, black, gay journalist who recently converted to Islam.

Four years ago, the magazine’s Shawn Otto warned that “the new science denialism is creating an existential crisis like few the country has faced before.”

“Otto wrote those words in the heat of a presidential election race that now seems quaint by comparison to the one the nation now finds itself in,” the magazine’s editorial board wrote in a piece that will appear in September’s print edition:

Scientific American is not in the business of endorsing political candidates. But we do take a stand for science—the most reliable path to objective knowledge the world has seen—and the Enlightenment values that gave rise to it. For more than 170 years we have documented, for better and for worse, the rise of science and technology and their impact on the nation and the world. We have strived to assert in our reporting, writing and editing the principle that decision making in the sphere of public policy should accept the conclusions that evidence, gathered in the spirit and with the methods of science, tells us to be true.

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who pays even superficial attention to politics that over the past few decades facts have become an undervalued commodity. Many politicians are hostile to science, on both sides of the political aisle. The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a routine practice of meddling in petty science-funding matters to score political points. Science has not played nearly as prominent a role as it should in informing debates over the labeling of genetically modified foods, end of life care and energy policy, among many issues.

The current presidential race, however, is something special. It takes antiscience to previously unexplored terrain. When the major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago, we can only hope that there is nowhere to go but up.

In October, as we did four years previously, we will assemble answers from the campaigns of the Democratic and Republican nominees on the public policy questions that touch on science, technology and public health and then publish them online. We will support ScienceDebate.org’s efforts to persuade moderators to ask important science-related questions during the presidential debates. We encourage the nation’s political leaders to demonstrate a respect for scientific truths in word and deed. And we urge the people who vote to hold them to that standard.