The APS In Hot Doo-Doo Over Trump Congratulatory Statement

OK, I missed this, and only now got wind of it.

The  APS issued a congratulatory statement to Donald Trump for winning the US Presidency election, along with urging him to invest in science and technology.

Unfortunately, that congratulatory message didn't go well with a lot of the members, and that message has now been taken down.

The statement smacked many readers as tone-deaf because of Trump’s antagonism to science, as evidenced by his statements suggesting that climate change is a hoax, endorsing online polls over statistically modeled ones and linking vaccines to autism.

According to Prescod-Weinstein, the slogan “Make America Great Again” is problematic because it presupposes that the United States was great when African-Americans were “more likely to be hanged from a tree than welcomed in the physics community” and when Nazi war criminals “became central to the American scientific establishment.”

“If APS’s leadership had any imagination — or concern for those of us who are being threatened by emboldened racists/transphobes/etc.,” she continued, “they would have said, ‘We urge President-elect Trump to finally actually make America great through the allocation of resources that will combat discrimination and hate in all their forms.’”

All I can say is that these next few years are going to be "interesting".

Zz.