The Other McCain

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Atheist Creep Lawrence Krauss Becomes a Pariah in the Scientific Community

Posted on | February 28, 2018 | Comments Off on Atheist Creep Lawrence Krauss Becomes a Pariah in the Scientific Community

“When women come to me to warn me about what speakers to avoid at conferences or confide in me sexual harassment they’ve experienced, Lawrence Krauss is by far the most common name I hear.”
— Jen McCreight

Almost every prominent man in the atheist movement is a lecherous creep, according to women in the movement, who began publicly complaining about five years ago how they were constantly harassed and groped by the vile perverts who attend atheist conferences.

In 2013, I wrote about the notorious Lawrence Krauss, and figured that anyone who Googled his name would know what a creep he is, but it took years — and the #MeToo movement — before other journalists decided to investigate the accusations against Professor Krauss. Peter Aldhous, Azeen Ghorayshi and Virginia Hughes of BuzzFeed spent months working on their very detailed article about Professor Krauss, who teaches physics at Arizona State University. It turns out he may have left his previous job under duress:

Case Western Reserve University restricted star physicist Lawrence Krauss’s access to campus in 2009 because of a sexual harassment complaint, according to a report in BuzzFeed News.
But by the time the sanctions were put in place, Krauss had left for Arizona State University, BuzzFeed said. He was permitted to return to CWRU in 2009 for a colloquium.
The allegation at CWRU was among several reported by BuzzFeed News against Krauss in the last decade. . . .
Krauss came to CWRU in 1993 as chair of the Physics Department and hired some of the current physics faculty before stepping down as the chair in 2005.

In other words, Professor Krauss’s departure from Case Western may not have been entirely voluntary, but the accusations against him there were kept hush-hush and he made the move to Arizona State without any public scandal. Yet his reputation was very bad, even by the disreputable standards of the atheist community, and Rebecca Watson calls Professor Krauss “someone I’ve always known was extremely shady.”

 

Watson recommends the BuzzFeed article as “painstakingly researched,” including multiple women “reporting the same kind of sexual harassment from Lawrence Krauss over and over, all over the world.” Yet she says even this has not convinced the, uh, “denialists”:

Despite how well-researched it is, of course there are people falling over themselves to defend Krauss. These people have taken Occam’s Razor and thrown it in the garbage, because they think it’s more likely that all of these separate women decided independently to lie about Lawrence Krauss sexually harassing and assaulting them, than that Krauss did it.

Nevertheless, Professor Krauss is beginning to suffer consequences:

Several talks by Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics at Arizona State University and a well-known skeptic, were canceled after BuzzFeed reported on allegations of sexual harassment against him. Krauss, who denies the claims, will not speak at the American Physical Society’s meeting in April, it announced Friday. The society “deplores harassment in all its forms and remains committed to ensuring a respectful and safe environment at its meetings,” it said in a statement. Among other appearances, Krauss’s book talk at Massachusetts Institute of Technology next month has been canceled.

 

Professor Krauss had been scheduled to appear last Friday with fellow atheists Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty at a “Celebration of Science and Reason” in Phoenix, but after the BuzzFeed article was published, Professor Krauss was scratched from the agenda. How many more events will be cancelled before Professor Krauss becomes persona non grata? Hasn’t this exposure already irreparably damaged his reputation? He was once what passed for a “celebrity” in the atheist community — his books were popular and he got a good bit of media publicity — but those days are clearly over, and what does Professor Krauss have left now, except a teaching job in Arizona? He’s a washed-up has-been, and he probably won’t be invited to many conferences in the future.

Live by the “science,” die by the “science.”

 

Category: Science

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