Colin Wright
Seeing lots of surprised reactions to the absurd Nature editorial on Jason Arday. Frankly, I'm surprised people are surprised. Nature has been totally captured by wokeness for a while now. I've been trying to call attention to this for nearly a decade. There are no serious scholars left there in influential positions capable of rescuing it. The people in charge of Nature today are brazenly hostile to the foundational principles that made Nature a highly respected and trustworthy institution in the first place. Today, activists have hijacked it and are using the prestige associated with the Nature brand to push an ideological agenda. They don't care that they're quickly burning through the immense trust that was slowly and painstakingly built by generations of competent scholars and stewardship. They're willing to burn through it all in a decade for power. It's an absolute tragedy. Nature has gone all-in on decoloniality, which holds that academic rigor and scientific objectivity are forms of colonial oppression rooted in white supremacy. It seeks to elevate Indigenous "ways of knowing," which amount to tribal myths and forms of religious mysticism, as an equally valid system of producing knowledge. And they don't want this absurd notion to remain theoretical; they want to implement these principles in areas that deal with life and death—medicine and nursing. I know what I'm saying sounds absurd. People can't possibly believe that. Like, I must be exaggerating, right? I promise you that I'm not. If anything, I'm dramatically understating the problem. We are in the midst of a total academic crisis, and we need to stop acting surprised and start taking action to delegitimize these journals and root these fields out of our public and publicly-funded institutions. If we don't, it's only going to get worse.
