Democrats have become the anti-science party

by Richard Schulman

In their pursuit of identity politics, Democrats have become the anti-science party. In Hawaii, they are supporting Native Hawaiian activists preventing the construction of the planned Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea. If ever built, the telescope’s optics will advance knowledge of how galaxies began in the early universe and what planets orbiting distant stars look like.

This is not the first time that backward, anti-science native activists, backed by Democratic politicians, have sabotaged scientific research. In the 1990s, Democratic politicians and their allies destroyed the important field of American Indian archaeology by supporting the wholesale “repatriation” of ancient bones and artifacts from museums to Indian tribes with no connection to the repatriated objects. Most of the repatriated objects were intended to be destroyed by burial.

Graduate students in archaeology are no longer choosing American Indian studies as their field of concentration but instead electing to focus on other countries where archaeological research is still valued and welcomed. Thus, one of the most important chapters in human history — the settling of the Americas from the Eastern hemisphere — has been destroyed by the anti-science party, at least as far as US sites are concerned.

Democratic politicians are also poisoning climate science by falsely claiming that “the science is settled” and harassing those who disagree.

Mauna Kea

Native Hawaiian activists and their celebrity supporters have been blocking construction of the TMT for five years running. There are presently 13 telescopes atop Mauna Kea. Last July, when TMT construction was again set to begin, activists forced the shut down of all the telescopes on the site for several weeks, followed subsequently by a partial re-opening.

The activists claim that Mauna Kea is sacred to native Hawaians and “has always been theirs.” But the astronomical site is on public land. By refusing to halt the activists’ blockade, the Hawaiian politicians going along with the activists are in violation of the First Amendment, the very first sentence of which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” That amendment was subsequently extended to cover state governments in the Fourteenth Amendment. Hence, the state of Hawaii’s has no right to enforce an unconstitutional property rights claim of a self-declared religious group to public land. That goes all the more so when doing so nullifies the contractual rights of scientific researchers and governments that have invested millions of dollars there for the benefit of humanity.

Despite this constitutional reality, the University of Hawaii, the designated steward of the telescope site, has agreed to uninstall five telescopes in return for agreement by the activists to let construction of the TMT go ahead. But even if that offer results in a deal – which it hasn’t so far — the future of the remaining telescopes is uncertain because the university’s stewardship of the site expires in 2033, and the state of Hawaii might not renew its lease.

The anti-science party repudiated by natives

The anti-TMT action of the Native Hawaiian activists isn’t supported by a majority of Hawaiians. “[A] poll of 1,367 state residents, released on 7 August by the Honolulu Civil Beat newspaper, found that 64% supported the project while 31% opposed it,” Nature reports.

This mirrors similar push-back from Canadian Native Indians and Alaska’s North Slope Inupiats. On Jan. 24th of this year, the city of Victoria, capital of British Columbia, voted to demand that BC and Ottawa halt construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in a city resolution labelled “Declaration of Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en People.” Victoria never bothered consulting the Wet’suwet’ens regarding their views, which the latter soon made known: “BE IT RESOLVED that the City of Victoria has no right to interfere in the democratic processes of First Nations, nor to call for a halt in construction, nor to meddle in an issue that is for the Wet’suwet’en people alone to decide.”

Goldman Sachs met an even more blistering response from the Inupiat mayor of Alaska’s North Slope Borough, published in the Feb. 2, 2020 Wall Street Journal under the heading, “Goldman Sachs to Native Alaskans: Drop Dead.” The mayor wrote:

Largely because of the oil and gas under our lands, which are developed using the highest environmental standards, we have come far….I’m proud that Prudhoe Bay has produced 18 billion barrels of oil since 1977, contributing billions of dollars to state coffers and funding development in Native Alaskan communities….[T]hanks to oil production, our children are no longer forced to live hundreds of miles away from their families simply to attend high school….Many of us now live near a cutting-edge medical clinic. We can heat our homes, turn on our lights with a flick of the switch, and in some cases we even have indoor plumbing….Goldman executives are simply looking to curry political favor with powerful green interests. The cost of Goldman Sachs’s hypocrisy will be paid by my people, who may soon be on a path back to the deprivation and hardship our ancestors worked so hard to leave behind.

The activists’ false narrative

Native Hawaiian activists falsely claim that their kingdom was stolen from them by white American imperialists. This became the basis of the Apology Resolution on Jan. 21, 1993 – the second day of Bill Clinton’s presidency. It was sponsored by Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye, both Democratic senators from Hawaii. The Resolution passed Congress, both houses of which were controlled by Democrats. It acknowledged “that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and further acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum.”

The Apology Resolution was based on the Blount Report compiled shortly after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in Spring 1893. Democratic President Grover Cleveland endorsed the report and favored the queen. But the following February, a subsequent report, the Morgan Report,

after public hearings and testimony under oath found the Blount Report to be mistaken on many of the facts reported. Some of the criticisms of the Blount Report included the fact that it was done in secrecy, with no opportunity for cross-examination of witnesses and no witnesses placed under oath. Opponents of the Apology Resolution point to this official repudiation of the Blount Report as sufficient reason to dismiss any conclusions based on it. Despite being staunchly in favor of reinstating the monarchy, President Grover Cleveland also reversed himself upon receipt of the Morgan Report, refusing requests from the queen for further aid in her restoration, and acknowledging both the Provisional Government and Republic of Hawaii as the legitimate successors to the Kingdom.

Astonishingly, the Democrats who passed the Apology Resolution a century later in 1993 cited the discredited Blount Report in support of their action, ignoring its subsequent discrediting by both the Morgan Report and their party’s president then, Grover Cleveland. The so-called Native Hawaiian movement now blocking astronomy’s progress on Mauna Kea is an offshoot of the spurious Apology Resolution and the creation of a synthetic native movement for purposes of identity-group pandering by Senators Akaka and Inouye.

The leftist-controlled Nature magazine has also been a leading participant in this historical fraud and its assault on science. The magazine wrote that

Whatever the outcome, the debate over the TMT is profoundly transforming how astronomy is done in Hawaii. The island chain — one of the world’s best platforms for stargazing — has become a testing ground for the ethics of conducting research in a place full of injustice towards Indigenous peoples.

Sorry, Nature, there was no injustice, so you’re now in the company of Victoria city and Goldman Sachs.

NAGPRA and the Taliban

The German-owned magazine Scientific American, once reputable and pro-science, is now no better than Nature. Two years ago it ran an editorial by its leftist editors captioned “Indigenous Remains Do Not Belong to Science. The law that allows Native Americans to claim ancestral remains must be strengthened.” The law that Scientific American was referring to is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This poorly-crafted law was passed in 1990 by a Democratic Congress and signed by Republican president George H.W. Bush, who should have vetoed it. The president had been lobbied heavily for two years by Indian groups and recognized the fact that they did indeed have longstanding grievances.

One of the several Indian acts passed with the president’s approval was the Native American Languages Act of 1990, which favored preservation rather than suppression of Native American languages. That was a worthwhile bill. NAGPRA, to the contrary, wasn’t. Passed by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress, it was one of the most anti-science and anti-cultural-heritage bill ever enacted anywhere. It arguably did more harm to museum and university study of America’s Indian heritage than the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

NAGPRA required museums and universities to inventory all their skeletal and cultural artifacts, publish the inventories, and return all objects to any Indians with a plausible claim to them. Most museums and university departments didn’t even bother doing due diligence. They depend on public money and didn’t want the bad publicity they feared that activists could generate to hurt their funding.

The activists’ false narrative

Space here only permits reporting a few of the crimes against scientific research that could have benefited humanity and American Indians especially. The late Clement Meighan, emeritus professor of anthropology at UCLA, explained in Academic Questions:

“(1) A 1991 agreement between the West Virginia Department of Transportation and a committee, of Indians and non-Indians, claiming to represent Indian viewpoints required that everything unearthed in an ongoing study of the 2,000-year-old Adena mound (found in the path of a new highway) be given up for reburial within a year….The 1.8 million dollar excavation is federally funded-in the interest of science. Yet nothing of tangible archaeological evidence was to be preserved. In addition, Indian activists were paid by the state to monitor the excavation, to censor the final report, and to prevent any “objectionable” photographs or data from appearing. The state of West Virginia even accepted such specific conditions as that…no remains, including artifacts, were to be touched by menstruating women. Yet none of the Indian activists whose “religious” claims were thus honored can demonstrate any relation to the people who built this mound two millennia ago…. As if to emphasize their contempt for real relationships, the group of activists that demanded reburial of the Adena mound remains included Indians from as far away as the Makah tribe of northwestern Washington, as well as non-Indians. Meanwhile, the views of the United Cherokee Tribe of West Virginia, which favored preservation of the remains, were ignored.

“(2) In 1992, Idaho’s Historic Preservation Office gave up for reburial a skeleton dated by radiocarbon at 10,600 years old, possibly the oldest directly dated human remains in the New World. Studies employing DNA and chemical analysis were not made of those bones and now they can never be made. Although the bones are separated by 420 generations from present-day Indians–almost five times more remote from them than Greeks of Homer’s generation are from present-day Greeks–the state “returned” the bones for reburial to one group of its contemporary Indian citizens, the Shoshone-Bannock. The Shoshone-Bannock are no more likely than any other Indian group – in North, Central, or South America – to have descended from the family or tribe to which those bones belong.”

Meighan continued:

“Yet the multiple laws and regulations inhibiting archaeological research, physical anthropology, and museum studies have all been instigated and justified in the name of Indian religious beliefs. This is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, no other religious group in the United States has been given the same protection. Second, most Indians no longer hold these beliefs. Third, Indians’ knowledge of the traditions and beliefs of their ancestors is derived in large part, though not wholly, from the collections and scholarship that the activists among them are now seeking to destroy.
…
“[E]ven were it true that bones once examined need never be studied again, the demand that they be reburied conflicts with the general rule that scientists and other scholars must preserve their data. If research data are subject to destruction, then there can be no guarantee of honest reporting; nor would there be any basis on which to challenge honest but possibly erroneous conclusions. Reburying bones and artifacts is the equivalent of a historian’s burning documents after he has perused them.”

The scandal of Kennewick man

In July 1996 a skull was found in Kennewick, Washington along the Columbia River and subsequently, “three hundred and fifty pieces of bone to assemble the almost complete skeleton of a male about five feet eight inches tall, forty to forty five years of age,” Glynn Custred wrote, also in Academic Questions. He is professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, East Bay, and a principal architect of Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative:

“A small portion of bone was then sent to the University of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating. The results showed that Kennewick Man was approximately 9,300 years old…. Eventually anthropologist Joseph Powell of the University of New Mexico was allowed to examine the skeleton. His conclusion was that Kennewick Man…resembled south Asians and the Ainu of northeast Asia more closely than any living population….Kennewick Man, however, is not alone in differing from modern Indians. In fact, skeletons found in the Americas that are older than 8,000 years resemble the Ainu and south Asians more than they do any other population, while modern American Indians show a strong resemblance to their closest relatives in north Asia (Siberians, Tibetans, Mongolians, and northern Chinese)….These differences suggest that a shift in physical types took place around 8,000 years ago in both North and South America, thereby indicating a major genetic shift in the ancient populations of both continents….The peopling of the Americas is one of the most puzzling mysteries of archeology.”

Kennewick man thus was an important piece of evidence toward the resolution of an important debate bearing on migration, settlement of the Americas, cultural replacement, and even climate change, which may have driven some of the migrations. Custred continues:

“When news got out about Kennewick Man, a coalition of Indian tribes in eastern Washington State (the Umatilla, the Nez Perce, the Yakima, the Wanapum, and the Colville Confederation) demanded possession of the bones, claiming that Kennewick Man was their ancestor. They made this claim despite the fact that native peoples, like populations all over the world, have moved from place to place over the last 9,000 years, and despite the obvious biological differences between Kennewick Man and any Indian group now alive. The United States Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over the discovery site, ordered the coroner to transfer the skeleton to the Corps’ facilities. From there they planned to turn the bones over to the coalition for immediate burial.”

Basing itself on NAGPRA, the National Park Service, like the Army Corps of Engineers an arm of the Clinton administration,

“arbitrarily declared that any cultural material older than ‘1492’ is Native American and the property of whatever tribe lives in the vicinity of its discovery….NAGPRA expressly provides that scientific data may be used to establish cultural affiliation. The tribal coalition refused to permit such scientific study of the skeleton on ‘religious’ grounds maintaining that physical tests would be intrusive….

“The Corps of Engineers then announced plans to destroy the site. The reason they gave was to stabilize the shore. The site lies in the congressional district of Congressman Doc Hastings who until a short time before that had lived nearby. Like others familiar with that stretch of the river, Hastings said that the bank did not need stabilizing. Moreover, the site had been registered as a national landmark and thus fell under the provisions of the National Preservation Act. Hastings then introduced a site protection bill that passed both houses of Congress. The legislation was awaiting the end of the congressional recess for action by the president when the Department of Justice summoned the Corps of Engineers to the White House to discuss what should be done next.

“In April 1998, despite the passage of the site preservation bill and despite a report from the Corps’ own archeologist advising against it, the Corps dumped 500 tons of rock and gravel on the site from helicopters and layered the shore line with more than 300 tons of dirt and logs. They then planted trees on top of the newly configured terrain all at a cost to the taxpayer of $160,000. Geologist Tom Stafford said of the work that ‘the Corps destroyed as much of the site as fast as possible. It’s like they hit it with a nuclear bomb.’ In this way the federal bureaucracy effectively shut down one line of investigation into America’s prehistory.”

The description above suggests that the destruction of the archaeological site happened with President Clinton’s encouragement and approval.

The NMAI

The National Museum of the American Museum (NMAI) was similarly devastated. Previously, the museum had had “a history of distinguished scholarship and committed public service,” author Judith Brundin reports in yet another excellent Academic Questions article. But along with a 1989 reorganization, “the newly appointed Cheyenne-Arapaho director, W. Richard West, Jr., and the program administrator, Rick Hill of Tuscarora-Mohawk descent, indicated publicly that the NMAI would thenceforth be run for and by native people….Hill referred to whites as ‘cowboys’ and insisted their perspectives were ‘racist.’ He stated publicly that the appointment of a Caucasian to head NMAI would be tantamount to a ‘German direct[ing] the U.S. Holocaust Museum.’”

Brundin continues:

Based on my own lengthy experience, most Indian people do not necessarily harbor ill feeling toward anthropologists or museums. On the whole, they support and are appreciative of the role of museums in preserving their culture and history. This, however, is hardly the picture that the new NMAI leadership wished to perpetuate…. No sooner had the repatriation policy been publicized than there were reports that members of the Iroquois Confederacy were coming down from upstate New York to pick up collection artifacts in trucks.

UNESCO

Now art is also at risk. Edward Rothstein, then a reporter for the New York Times, wrote how UNESCO was also getting into the act at the expense of art museums. UNESCO claimed that “artworks, objects, symbols and relics do not just merit protection; they should be ‘returned’ to their ‘countries of origin,’ the only places, supposedly, where they can be fully appreciated. This has nothing to do with whether they were obtained illicitly or inappropriately.”

In keeping with UNESCO’s pronouncement, Rothstein continues, “Greek authorities told The Guardian of London, ‘Whatever is Greek, wherever in the world, we want back.’ And while touring the Metropolitan Museum in 2006, Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that even nonlooted objects were ‘icons of our Egyptian identity,’ adding: ‘They should be in the motherland. They should not be outside Egypt.’”

Contra UNESCO and its supporters, Rothstein concludes: “[I]f cultural property really did exist, the Enlightenment museum would be an example of it: an institution that evolved, almost uniquely, out of Western civilization. And the cultural property movement could be seen as a persistent attempt to undermine it. And take illicit possession.”

How did Democrats become the anti-science party?

Consider: why do Democratic politicians prefer international organizations like UNESCO to the elected representative bodies of the US? President Obama demonstrated such a preference in the Paris Treaty and the JCPOA (the Iran treaty).

Up until the Johnson administration, the Democratic Party was largely based on a coalition of southern states and those northern states with large blue-collar and unionized work forces. From the Nixon administration on, support for Democrats evaporated in much of the South. At the same time, the left-leaning, anti-war, draft-resisting youth cohort of the 1960s and early 1970s began winning university positions and turning the already Progressive-oriented universities into almost all-blue affairs.

Progressives in the humanities and social sciences promulgated trendy ideas imported from Europe, especially Germany and France, that merged Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. First, there was the New Left guru, Herbert Marcuse. When the New Left faded, deconstruction, relativism, and multicultural studies moved in. New departments were created for the special study of blacks, women, gays, Native Americans, Third World peoples, and more recently trans-genders. Identity groups sprang up nurtured by (and nurturing) the new departments.

The Democratic Party seized on these new identity-group constituencies to replace the earlier interest-group coalition that was slipping from their grasp. Bernie Sanders came along with the Marxist baggage, accompanied by all the young people in identity groups who now wanted their piece of the pie — such as student debt forgiveness — that Democrats had previously doled out to the interest groups.

To the identity groups, the Enlightenment and reason were just Western, white, male instruments of domination. “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go,” 500 Stanford students led by Jesse Jackson chanted in 1987 as they marched down the university’s main road.

Someone better read than the marching demonstraters might have marveled at the triumph of post-1929 Heidegger, for whom “the meaning of Being” and acceptance of your “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) was relative to your group, a historically determined social construct. There was no objective truth apart from that and certainly no science.

From there, one need not go very far to find demonstrators today being cheered on for halting science at one of the world’s premier astronomical sites; seizing and destroying irreplaceable objects that archaeologists are investigating; and applauding the repatriation of art works that were first found, preserved, restored, studied, and displayed for public admiration in Western museums.

Democrats were once civic-minded defenders of that heritage. Now, for narrow, short-term political gains, they indulge the ignorant with consequences that are devastating and irretrievable. This is the sense in which one of the nation’s two major parties, the Democrats, has become the anti-science party.