The American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world's largest and most influential scientific societies and publisher of Science magazine, held its annual conference at the Phoenix Convention Center from February 12 to 14. What attendees found was less a celebration of scientific achievement and more a three-day progressive grievance session, complete with gender pronoun stickers, workshops on "decolonial" climate approaches, and pointed attacks on the Trump administration.
Attendees were offered pronoun stickers including "they/them," "xi/xer," and "xe/xem." Workshop titles read like course offerings from a critical theory department. The opening night featured a 10-minute hoop dance routine from traditional Native American dancers. And the keynote rhetoric struck a tone one attendee described in blunt terms.
"This year felt like a funeral, with nothing but griping and moaning. Why would people want to keep coming back year after year with something like that?"
That unnamed attendee, speaking to Fox News Digital, said the contrast with previous years was stark. Even during the first Trump administration, the event maintained some focus on actual science. Not this time.
AAAS CEO Dr. Sudip Parikh opened the meeting by telling the audience it's been a "hard" and "tough year for science and scientists in this country." He blamed DOGE for the "devastation" of "some of our science agencies" and said the president's budget request "cut science by half," amounting to "forfeiting the future."
Then he escalated.
"What happened over the course of the last year is a rupture. We're not going back, it's not possible, too much damage has been done, too much has changed. There's an entire generation of scientists that have a scar, a scar that is not going to go away."
Parikh also told the crowd he warned last year that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the "wrong person" to lead Health and Human Services and said he still feels that way. He closed with a call that went well beyond science communication.
"It's going to take protests, it's going to take politics, it's going to take the ability to not speak gibberish, all of that has got to come together if we're going to fight for the inheritance of the enlightenment to continue to make this world a better place."
A CEO of a scientific society calling for protests and politics. Not peer review. Not replication studies. Protests.
The session titles tell their own story:
Not one of those titles contains a hypothesis, a variable, or a testable claim. Every one of them contains a political conclusion baked into the framing. "Resistance." "Power." "Colonial legacies." This is the vocabulary of activism dressed in a lab coat.
One featured speaker, climate justice scholar Jola Ajibade, explained how climate change has benefited a "few wealthy people" while "low-income communities are displaced." She described the focus of her work in explicitly racial terms.
"At the center of my work is giving a voice but also bringing to the attention of everyone the impact of a slew of climate solutions, the impact of those solutions on low-income communities, on Black communities, on indigenous, on Latino communities as well."
She added that she is focused on finding a "decolonial" approach. Whatever that means in the context of atmospheric chemistry, the AAAS was happy to give it a platform.
AAAS President Dr. Theresa A. Maldonado delivered the president's address, lamenting what a difficult year 2025 was for science and suggesting climate change was responsible for the devastating Southern California wildfires. No room for debate on that one, apparently.
Johnathan Butcher, acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, did not mince words when asked about the conference content.
"The AAAS says that their organization wants to 'inspire' future scientists and engineers, but session topics and material from their meeting actually discourage participants from relying on their effort and merit and turns the focus to race and ethnicity."
Butcher went further, pointing out the legal dimension that the AAAS seems content to ignore.
"These are the very same kind of racist ideas inspired by DEI that have been prohibited in universities, state governments, and the federal government, because the ideas violate state and federal civil rights laws. Policymakers should be aware of what this organization is doing and make sure the association is not promoting racial preferences in hiring, promotion or research awards in academia or anywhere else."
That framing matters. DEI programming has been rolled back across federal agencies, state governments, and universities precisely because sorting people by race for professional advancement violates the civil rights protections that were designed to prevent that exact practice. The AAAS is treating prohibited conduct as a conference theme.
Perhaps the most striking detail: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a state-run, Beijing-based research institute, operated a booth at the event. CAS has faced controversy over its ties to China's government and military. A 2013 U.S. bribery case involving NIH-funded research was linked to a Chinese medical technology firm that collaborated with CAS.
Lawmakers in the United States continue to warn about the growing threat posed by China and the CCP's infiltration of top institutions. And here was the Chinese Academy of Sciences, setting up shop at America's premier scientific conference, right alongside the pronoun stickers and decolonial climate panels.
The same organization that demands we keep politics out of science apparently sees no political problem with hosting a booth for a research arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
When asked about the conference's content, an AAAS spokesperson offered a carefully sanded response, noting that "a broad spectrum of the scientific enterprise attends the meeting" and that "AAAS respects their First Amendment right to free speech."
Free speech is a fine principle. But AAAS isn't merely hosting speech. It's curating it. It chose which sessions to include. It chose which scholars to platform. It chose to hand out pronoun stickers at a science conference. These are editorial decisions, not accidents of an open forum.
The unnamed attendee who spoke to Fox News Digital captured the deeper problem. The constant pleas to keep politics out of science, the attendee observed, "are completely undercut by their perpetual whining and endorsing utter craziness. They're happy for science to be political, as long as it's leftist."
That attendee also noted that attendance "greatly suffered this year compared to the pre-COVID years." Turns out, when you replace discovery with ideology, people stop showing up.
One of the event's sponsors was the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which is tied to Arabella Advisors through the New Venture Fund. Arabella Advisors is a progressive consulting behemoth, and the New Venture Fund is a nonprofit that pushes a variety of progressive causes. So the money behind the meeting has its own ideological fingerprints. None of this is accidental.
There was a time when the AAAS annual meeting was something scientists looked forward to. A place to share findings, hear about breakthroughs, and leave energized about the work ahead. The institution that publishes one of the world's most important scientific journals should be the last place where rigor takes a backseat to ideology.
Instead, the organization's leadership stood before a convention hall and called for protests. Its workshops treated racial categorization as a scientific method. Its sponsors are wired into the progressive nonprofit machine. And a state-run Chinese research body got a booth.
The attendee was right. It felt like a funeral. What they're burying is the credibility of the institution itself.
