JESSE SINGAL: Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals:
This should stand as a wake-up call, as a rebuke to the smugness that sometimes infects progressive beliefs about who “respects” science more. After all, what both the Bailey and Chagnon cases have in common — alongside some of the others in Galileo’s Middle Finger — is the extent to which groups of progressive self-appointed defenders of social justice banded together to launch full-throated assaults on legitimate science, and the extent to which these attacks were abetted by left-leaning academic institutions and activists too scared to stand up to the attackers, often out of a fear of being lumped in with those being attacked, or of being accused of wobbly allyship.
Everyone, of any political leaning, is vulnerable to such pressures. But lefties seem to care more about belonging.
The book is Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, by Alice Dreger.