The last time we checked in on the James Webb Telescope, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials rejected the demands of LGBTQ activists and diversity-inclusion minions to change the instrument’s name.
Internal investigations showed “…no available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation.”
Enter Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi. He is a famous American astrophysicist and author of some of the most popular children’s books on science. Oluseyi is also the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.
After his research into Webb’s professional history, he wrote a detailed account of his investigation, concluding that Webb’s accusers failed to be rigorous in their research.
The entire analysis is brilliant and damning to everyone who has mindlessly called for renaming the space telescope.
Toward Stonewall did not properly cite the sources for the Senate testimony that ignited the Lavender Scare and was loose with language, thus facilitating the Wikipedia misattribution to Webb — in conflict with the Wikipedia pages on Peurifoy and The Lavender Scare, which both explicitly name Peurifoy’s 1950 testimony as the prime initiation event.The two authors who wrote the articles on forbes.com and thestranger.com did not apply proper journalistic rigor. They accepted the rumors without corroboration from authoritative sources — and worse, piled on.The author of the forbes.com article references a professional astrophysicist as his original source for learning of the allegations against Webb. This scientist propagated unsubstantiated false information as if it were true without performing proper scientific rigor to investigate its veracity.The community of astronomers and astrophysicists in the online social media group who blindly accepted the allegations also piled on and were ready to confront NASA although they did not apply proper rigor.
He offers his own perspective on the subject based on his experiences as a black scientist and researcher.
As a Black scientist from the Deep South who’s had to navigate the shoals of a scientific establishment where I’ve not always felt welcome, I imagine how I would feel if I faced the equivalent — a flagship national observatory named after someone who was accused of being a staunch racist and national enforcer of racial segregation.Thankfully, Webb was not the bigoted homophobe who led State Department witch hunts as rumored.
Read the whole piece: It is a masterclass in what the best bloggers can do.
The New York Times did a detailed investigation of the fight over the telescope after the analysis’s publication in 2021, which occurred shortly before Oluseyi accepted a position at George Mason University. At that point, woke activists attempted to cancel him.
Leading the charge against Oluseyi was black feminist physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein of the University of New Hampshire. She authored a Scientific American piece demanding NASA rename the telescope.
…George Mason University recruited Dr. Oluseyi as a visiting professor, and Peter Plavchan, an astronomy professor, offered a tweet of welcome to the man he played a role in recruiting.Dr. Prescod-Weinstein objected. In a stream of tweets, she said Dr. Oluseyi had championed “a homophobe.”She wrote that Dr. Plavchan’s welcome was “a reminder that senior men in astronomy can treat junior women” poorly — using an expletive — “and be welcomed by colleagues with open arms.”Dr. Plavchan apologized to her, writing on Twitter that “I do believe @HakeemOluseyi owes you and LGBTQ+ astronomers an apology.”He added that he had “privilege to be able to not feel marginalized by what Hakeem wrote.”
Because the activists had no hard data to back up their claims, other than the fact that Webb was an administrator in a bureaucracy, Oluseyi was then personally attacked.
For speaking out about his research, Oluseyi also has faced claims of past sexual harassment and other misconduct during his time at Florida Tech, some of which are “demonstrably false” and the others unsubstantiated, the Times found.
Despite the findings of The New York Times, hardly a conservative publication, and NASA itself…Prescod-Weinstein persisted.
Jonathan Kay, a contributor at Quillette, did his own investigation on the cancel campaign against Oluseyi and came to this conclusion about the seemingly one “woman” crusade against the famed astrophysicist:
She provides readers with no names or details, however. Instead, she simply notes that “it is a shame that the New York Times continues to give him a platform to behave like this.” Prescod-Weinstein’s first two cancel campaigns, against Webb and Oluseyi, both ended in failure. Perhaps she’s hoping this third one proves a charm.
Hopefully, Oluseyi can do his wonderful scientific work without woke drama in 2023. Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope continues to operate spectacularly on this one-year anniversary.
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