Not knowing (or caring to find out) what happened when I was invited to teach journalism in China, Judy Stein takes my report published in the National Association of Science Writers Newsletter and invents a bizarre interpretation, full of weird twists and outright falsehoods.
But her sentence that pisses me off the most is one more example of her
malicious and petty bigotry. To tear me down, she seeks to dismiss the
courage, hard work, and honesty of one of my Chinese students by saying:
"Or perhaps he saw the advantage to himself of behaving in a way that
would please you, of making himself a contrast to the other students."
Judy portrays my student Tom as a toady currying my favor. What
constituted this "toadying?" His hard work, his honesty and disdain for
cheating, his knowledge of history and current affairs, his scholarly
excellence? Toadying? Well if that's toadying, then it's the kind of toadying that got him into Stanford University graduate school with a full tuition fellowship and a comfortable stipend.
This is so typical of Judy Stein; to strike at her enemies she'll insult and demean anyone. Tom's honesty, courage, and hard work were insincere postures to curry my favor, she suggests. When the Carter Center awarded me a prestigious fellowship in mental health journalism, she said I was given the great honor because the Carters are Christian Fundamentalists and hate TM. She brazenly continues to defend that bigoted and totally unfounded statement. More recently, she went after the late Carl Sagan, saying that he took one look at the "little brown-skinned dude in sheets and beads and flowers" and concluded that the science Maharishi teaches "could not possibly be anything but pseudo."
Judy recycled that bigoted slur. She used it in a 1995 post on sci.skeptic to explain why medical organizations and journalists "swallowed [the JAMA expose on TM's deceptive marketing tactics] whole, never even thinking to do any checking on their own before bestowing their accolades upon it. [Because TMers], who are led by a little brown-skinned, bearded dude in sheets and beads, must simply be a bunch of scam artists or deluded weirdoes, or both."
In other words, scientists, journalists, and anyone else who criticizes the pseudoscience and deceptive tactics of the TM movement do so because they are racist bigots, says Judy.
The bigotry that Judy accuses others of clearly rests in her own
twisted mind. So blinded by hate, she cannot see how transparent it is
to others.