Why Conservatives Despise Neil deGrasse Tyson: 5 Times the Scientist Provoked Right-Wing Hissy Fits

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/belief/why-conservatives-despise-neil-degrasse-tyson-5-times-scientist-provoked-right-wing-hissy

1) Gavin McInnes goes full supremacist. Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice, has always been a wretched human being, but since he left the publication in 2008, he’s only become even more of a hateful right-wing nut. Over the summer, he went on Fox News to issue a racist diatribe about Tyson that was extreme even by their Bill O’Reilly-set standards. After bizarrely denying that Tyson is an astrophysicist---which is, like Isaac Newton’s birthday, an objective fact---he whined, “White liberal nerds love this guy so much, he could defecate on them,” and then argued that Tyson had it coming when cops harassed him in his youth because Tyson wore “a huge afro and a cutoff shirt.”

2) Charles C.W. Cooke unleashes the green-eyed monster. In a July piece for the National Review titled “Smarter Than Thou” that was little more that pretentiously worded jealous sniping, Cooke, like McInnes, denied that Tyson---and other liberal pundits and journalists who have reputations as public intellectuals---is an authentic geek. His reasoning for this was that Tyson and folks like Richard Dawkins and Rachel Maddow “are attractive, accomplished, well paid, and loved.” Apparently, to be considered a true intellectual on the right, it doesn’t matter how many degrees you hold or scientific discoveries you make. No, the only thing that matters is if you shower so infrequently that no one will have sex with you.

3) Rich Lowry thinks that the fact that Tyson is not infallible means he is thoroughly discredited. Tyson, being a human being, makes mistakes. To scientists and other reality-based people, this isn’t a big deal. All people sometimes make mistakes, but that doesn’t mean that they have nothing important to say or contribute. (Which is why science is able to build on the theories of Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton even after some aspects of their original theories are proved wrong.) Tyson was caught misquoting George W. Bush a few times, which he admitted. But Rich Lowry, writing for Politico, pounced, writing, “The problem is the belief of his fans—encouraged by him—that science has all the answers; that anyone who believes in physics must adhere to a progressive secularism; that anyone not on board is—to borrow from the accusations of Tyson’s defenders—guilty of anti-intellectualism, climate ‘denial’ and racism.”


4) How dare Cosmos tell the truth about evolution! It was no big surprise that, while Tyson is an astrophysicist, his reboot of Carl Sagan’s legendary science show Cosmos would focus heavily on explaining evolutionary theory. After all, evolutionary theory is both an elegant theory for explaining in a televised format and it just so happens to be the one which is most confused in the public imagination by conservatives that are always trying to attack and confuse the issue. Creationists were out in force when Cosmos did its evolution episode, trotting out the same hackneyed arguments that any biologist can debunk, knowing full well that their followers have no intention of actually checking to see if biologists have debunked these talking points. It was a manuever steeped in cynicism, using a display of faux erudition in order to discourage real scientific inquiry, the exact sort of thing that Cosmos was attempting to counter with its appealing stories and cool-looking graphics.

[Arkansas Granny]

1. Anyone who offers knowledge that runs counter to their mythology

and superstitions is subject to the same treatment.

This remark says it all:
. . . knowing full well that their followers have no intention of actually checking to see if biologists have debunked these talking points. . . .

This is why the rwnj's can lie to their base about any number of subjects. They know that they won't be fact checked by the faithful.

[rurallib]

2. Tyson should quote FDR on this one:

"and I welcome their hate."

[Skittles]

3. nice to have a spokesman for reality

I've had to listen to sanctimonious crap my entire life