^{Chapman’s News & Ideas} Scientist’s Unethical Quote Fabrication

Neil deGrasse Tyson is supposedly a scientist of such renown that the Fox network decided to build a new “Cosmos” TV series around him. Fox was repaid–deservedly–by really bad ratings. The programs not only were boring but the boring also revealed one factual misstatement after another.

Tyson turns out to be a political propagandist for a particular secular agenda, not an objective observer of science. Similarly, Tyson just now has been called out by The Federalist for serial fabrications of quotations on George W. Bush. In a breathtaking takedown, Sean Davis reviews some of Tyson’s past inventions, and then focuses on a particularly obnoxious and sophomoric attack on Bush’s supposed ideas on the stars. If President Bush could be faulted on science issues, it is  not, as Tyson claims, for being ignorant and destructive, but for the misjudgment of  naming Tyson to a presidential science committee. How did someone as shoddy as Tyson slip by?

We have rules agains plagiarism by scientists, don’t we? Well, how about a little peer pressure on a scientist who misuses his credentials to radically misrepresent a public figure’s statements on scientific matters? You cannot read the Federalist piece without realizing (if you didn’t already know) how badly Tyson–cheered on the by establishment–distorts facts on one thing after another in order to serve a false and tendentious narrative.