Neil deGrasse Tyson accused of “the science of smug condescension”

Science magazine reports that astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson has 2.4 million Twitter followers, nearly a million more than the second science star on the list, UK physicist and science popularizer Brian Cox . Tyson hosted the reboot of television’s Cosmos series, extending the work of the late astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan. Now Tyson is being attacked politically.

In July, the cover article “Smarter than thou: Neil deGrasse Tyson and America’s nerd problem” appeared at National Review, which was founded in 1955 by the late conservative William F. Buckley Jr and sees itself as “America’s most widely read and influential magazine and website for Republican/conservative news, commentary and opinion.” The article called Tyson “the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up ‘nerd’ culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States,” explaining:

National Review charged that “what Tyson and his acolytes have ended up doing is blurring the lines between politics, scholarship, and culture—thereby damaging all three.” The article offered what it called a “translation” of Tyson’s outlook: “All of my political and moral judgments are original, unlike those of the rubes who subscribe to ideologies, philosophies, and religious frameworks. My worldview is driven only by the data.” As can be seen in a two-minute video , the ultraliberal talk-show host and comedian Bill Maher, displaying the 21 July National Review cover caricaturing Tyson as huge-headed and “smarter than thou,” accused Republicans of hating him.

In September, several attacks have appeared at a year-old political website called The Federalist , published by Benjamin Domenech , a senior fellow at an institution known particularly in the climate wars: the Heartland Institute. Domenech has appeared on national TV. The site has been cited at CNN.com , The Hill , RealClearPolitics , and at least six times at the Wall Street Journal, which has also published at least three brief online commentaries from The Federalist’s writers.

Headlines and subheads on pieces from site cofounder Sean Davis summarize the attacks:

Another piece appeared under the headline “Neil deGrasse Tyson and the science of smug condescension .” The Federalist identifies the author, Robert Tracinski , as having been “published in dozens of newspapers, from the Chicago Tribune to the San Francisco Chronicle” and “featured on many radio and television shows, from Rush Limbaugh to ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’” Tracinski declares that the Davis attacks’ “common denominator” is Tyson’s alleged “tendency to construct stories that make Tyson—and, by extension, his fans in the audience—seem smart and sophisticated, while making his straw man opponents, particularly politicians on the right, look bumbling and ignorant.” Tracinski’s piece eventually links the criticisms to standard right-wing climate-wars assertions concerning the global-warming hiatus, global-cooling worries expressed in past decades, and stolen email messages in the controversy that Tracinski and others call “Climategate.”

The intelligent-design-defending Discovery Institute , another political organization cited in major media, has been echoing The Federalist’s attacks. One online posting invoked tweets in support of Davis’s campaign from Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and from Ann Coulter, the conservative TV pundit. Another , also praising Davis’s campaign, called Tyson “a political propagandist for a particular secular agenda, not an objective observer of science.” Yet another mostly just quoted Davis.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.