Michael Fumento writes on FB: Don’t get me wrong, Chris. I can WRITE whatever I wish; I’m just not allowed to publish anywhere. Even for free. It’s like when the Nazis took over in Germany or the Communists took over in eastern Europe. If you were an intellectual, or a corporate head, or perhaps just university professor you either joined the party or your career ended. You didn’t necessarily get sent to a camp like Dachau or to the Gulag, you just didn’t have a career anymore. Brilliant people with doctorates ended up as janitors and cooks, where it no longer matter what opinions they held or or well they researched and backed them up.
In the US, actually a good deal of my writing was or should have been apolitical. Like saying embryonic stem cells were little more than a nostrum and the future was in adult stem cells. I was completely right and indeed it’s recently been announced that mere blood transfusions can make mice “younger” because of the exposure to adult stem cells. But OTHER people converted stem cells to a political issue, often because they had invested massive amounts of money in embryonic research.
Indeed, my career was based on DEpoliticizing science, from AIDS and ethanol on. As such I was seen as dangerous to those who insisted on politicizing them. As American become less and less tolerant of dissenting views, one publication after another stopped running me because of a single article THEY had chosen to publish. Two gave me the boot for writing about the anti-vaccine hysteria; yet a third for making such a good case against the Atkins diet.
Meanwhile, virtually all think tanks went “pay for play.” Which, ironically, I was constantly accused of doing! But I COULDN’T do it. Just not wired that way. So the US polarized and you had to choose one team and be 100 percent loyal to it, people like me were put in position of those who refused to join the Nazi or Communist parties, not that I’m accusing either US major political party of being like either — it’s a metaphor. Indeed, REFUSING to do so was part of my problem.
So what does an honest intellectual and writer do in a time when society is more polarized than at any time since the Civil War? He can do what they’ve done since time immemorial and leave the country. I just haven’t been able to convert that into anything, in part because in the past the country that WELCOMED the dissenters was the US! Irony of ironies!
