Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show with your host, Eric Metaxus.

Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Nicholas Wade, science writer of many decades. And I have to ask you,

Mr. Wade, I've read your byline in the Times myself for decades. And I think that there was a time

when most Americans of any political stripe, they looked at science one way, they looked at

journalism one way. They knew that there are always going to be ideologues and people with biases,

but nonetheless, the basics were there. That seems, to my mind, have changed dramatically,

both in the world of journalism and in the world of

science, things that we took for granted, that there's a basis of objectivity. That's gone

away to some extent. And you have people in this day and age, it's on the left, who seem to be troubled by facts, as though facts

themselves can have almost a kind of taint that if you write a book as Charles Murray did or

as you did about race, just the idea of a genetic reality makes some people uncomfortable. But more recently,

it's, it's been more dramatic with the issue of sexual identity. I mean, I, I'd always been taught

as a kid that, you know, if you take a tube of blood from any human being, you could tell

pretty quickly if it's a male or a female,

suddenly that is controversial. I find that strange. I don't know why we can't get those basics

right and then have whatever conversations we want. It's quite bizarre. I don't know how you've

arrived at this point.

It requires a sociologist plus a psychiatrist to give us the answers.

I think it's something to do with the political spectrum shifting to the extreme left.

And the extreme left has managed to drag a lot of people along with it with ideas

that are sort of blatantly absurd,

such as denying their sexual differences, denying there's a biological basis to race.

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