The editor-in-chief of Scientific American, the nation’s oldest continuously-published magazine, has come under harsh criticism for her politically-charged comments in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday.
Laura Helmuth, who has led the publication since April 2020 took to her personal Bluesky account to air her grievances in since-deleted posts.
Any advice for what workplaces can do to help people who are devastated by the election? Thanks so much.
I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of f***ing fascists.
Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f*** them to the moon and back.
Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The Moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself.
TRIGGERED: Read these posts by Laura Helmuth the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American. These are the ‘experts’ we’re supposed to trust?
h/t @TheRabbitHole84 pic.twitter.com/dcJcry5eeh
— @amuse (@amuse) November 6, 2024
Historian Michael Shermer took Helmuth to task, writing, “I wrote a monthly column for Scientific American for 18 years and could not have been prouder to have been part of that 150-year old standard bearer of science and the search for truth. Those days are gone. @sciam is now a shill for far left woke progressives.”
I wrote a monthly column for Scientific American for 18 years and could not have been prouder to have been part of that 150-year old standard bearer of science and the search for truth. Those days are gone. @sciam is now a shill for far left woke progressives. Here is the EIC: pic.twitter.com/1renJW1TZe
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) November 7, 2024
Other figures have also criticized Helmuth, who previously served as The Washington Post’s editor of Health, Science and Environment.
Scientific American editor-in-chief is an embarrassment to science.
Get politics out of science, engineering, STEM education.
Science and engineering is about building cool shit, and exploring the mysteries of physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) November 8, 2024
The problem is that she places political activism above science https://t.co/ANsmLdmfEG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 8, 2024
Scientific American editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth has issued an apology, expressing a commitment to “editorial objectivity”.
Anyone who has observed the far-left politicization of @sciam‘s reporting over the last several years knows her words ring hollow.
Laura Helmuth must go. pic.twitter.com/8sRVSL0VVs
— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) November 7, 2024
Roughly three weeks before the 2024 election, Scientific American published a piece claiming “Former president Donald Trump, in his inimitable way, has done at least one service to the cause of honesty. In his blundering ramblings, he regularly exposes the racism, and its science-flavored pseudoscientific companion, eugenics, that still wounds America.”
In November 2023, Scientific American published an article which stated, “Inequity 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.”
Laura Helmuth has to go. As an editor, it’s her job to not let Scientific American become ideological and unscientitic. And she has utterly failed.
Here are three examples:
1. Men and women would run equally fast, if it wasn’t for biases in how they are treated in sports.
2.… https://t.co/yUvFvcqkqJ pic.twitter.com/1nhCK2rHBk
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) November 8, 2024
On November 7, Helmuth issued an apology on her website, writing:
I made a series of offensive and inappropriate posts on my personal Bluesky account on election night, and I am sorry. I respect and value people across the political spectrum. These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and confusion about the election results. These posts of course do not reflect the position of Scientific American or my colleagues. I am committed to civil communication and editorial objectivity.
Helmuth is not the only editor working at a scientific publication to express their political views. In August 2023, Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, who just been hired as a professor at George Washington University, stated, “The @NRA and everyone who supports them should burn in hell.” His tweet followed a shooting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which he had previously attended.
Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp exhibits partisanship, identitarian idiocy, and indifference to truth on levels at least equal to Scientific American Editor-in-Chief Laura Helmuth.
At a journal almost infinitely more important and impactful than Helmuth’s. pic.twitter.com/U2sTWNnZ0i
— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) November 8, 2024
