Potent techniques for toppling men from jobs that women want. By Nicholas Wade.
The best way to understand a society, social anthropologists say, is to start by studying its most bizarre, irrational, and self-defeating practice. If you can figure that out, everything else in the culture begins to make more sense.
In that light, consider President Biden’s firing of his top science advisor, Eric Lander. Lander was engaged in launching a $7.5 billion research agency to apply novel genomic methods to the treatment and reversal of cancer. At a White House press conference on February 2, the president called the agency “a central effort of the Biden-Harris administration.” Its aim, he said, was “to cut the cancer death rate in half in the next 25 years” and with this and other steps “to end cancer as we know it.”
In Lander, the president had an unusually well-qualified executive. Though trained as a mathematician, not a biologist, Lander has built the Broad Institute in Cambridge into a leading research group that has pioneered advanced genomic techniques. He had the special knowledge and managerial competence required to execute Biden’s ambitious anti-cancer program. Yet on February 7, a mere five days after Biden called for halving cancer deaths, Lander was forced to resign over a second-order management issue: that he had treated some of his female staff harshly. …
Merit takes the back seat to jobs for the feminists, who invented “crimes”:
Lander … was a victim of tribal warfare prosecuted by radical feminists, a lobby that Biden lacked the courage to challenge.
The feminist assault on Lander began the moment his appointment as science advisor was announced. A collective called 500 Women Scientists wrote a letter in Scientific American in January 2021 accusing Lander of being white and male. They went on to attack Lander for a 2016 article he wrote in Cell about the role of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in the invention of the CRISPR technique of genetic manipulation. That article, the 500 Women wrote, “erased the contributions of two women colleagues. This conspicuous exclusion is emblematic of the forces in science that hold back women and scientists of color from attaining the level of prominence he enjoys.”
Stepping over the cant about exclusion, the statement about erasure is simply false. …
Within a few months of Lander’s tenure as White House science advisor, women started complaining about his harsh manner. … An investigation was launched and concluded that Lander had spoken to women “in a demeaning or abrasive way.” …
He apologized profusely. But apologies work only with people willing to seek reconciliation, not with activists who see them as a signal for further attack. Wallace dug the knife in further. “Lander’s apology did not come close to addressing the full extent of his egregious behavior,” she said. The president could have sent Lander for charm training. Instead, Biden cut him loose.
What exactly was the “egregious behavior” that Wallace mentioned? Did Lander touch anyone inappropriately, make unwanted advances, or commit any kind of sexual harassment? The investigation found not the slightest evidence. Even stranger, it found “no credible evidence” that he treated men and women differently. Lander’s sole crime was caustic speech, to which apparently only women took offense.
If Lander were really so terrible a boss, surely his alleged maltreatment of women would have come to light at Harvard. Yet after his defenestration, reporters at the Boston Globe last week failed to find any evidence of this. “I have never seen a single instance of sexist behavior from Eric,” said Karen Hong, who had been a graduate student in his lab for eight years.
Lander’s firing exemplifies a serious problem: radical feminists have appropriated provisions designed to protect women from harassment in the workplace and have weaponized them into potent techniques for toppling men from jobs that women want.
The White House is now searching for a new science advisor to replace Lander and resume the task of launching Biden’s anti-cancer moonshot. The top two candidates, according to Politico, are — you guessed it — women.
A rising level of incompetence characterizes woke society.
