Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Replay - Who Was James Webb? An honest conversation with Hakeem Oluseyi (#280)

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

This is a replay of the discussion with Hakeem Oluseyi on the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope. It continues! Today the New York Time published an opinion piece entitled: How Naming the James Webb Telescope Turned Into a Fight Over Homophobia: Did the former head of NASA discriminate against gay people? One physicist tried to rebut the accusation, only to find himself the target of attacks. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/us/james-webb-telescope-gay-rights.html? The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s next great flagship observatory. It’s set to continue — and extend — the illustrious scientific tradition established by the Hubble Space Telescope, while peering deeper into the universe and observing what Hubble could not. But who was James Webb? Considering the controversy surrounding his legacy, I wanted to explore the allegations against him with my friend Hakeem Oluseyi and answer the question: Why was the James Webb Space Telescope named after him? Hakeem claims that some allegations wrongly accused an innocent man who was, among more well-known achievements, a hero of diversity and inclusion in American government. He worked with Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy to use NASA facilities in America’s southern states to promote racial integration and equal opportunity in employment Hakeem Oluseyi is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, inventor, educator, science communicator, author, actor, veteran, and humanitarian. Oluseyi was named a Visiting Robinson Professor at George Mason University in 2021, a distinction by which the university recognizes outstanding faculty. In 2021, he published an autobiography titled: A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars co-authored with Joshua Horwitz. His memoir tells the inspiring unlikely hero’s journey story from dealing drugs to dishing out the hardest of hardcore science communication and inspiration! Hakeem’s best known scientific contributions are research on the transfer of mass and energy through the Sun’s atmosphere; the development of space-borne observatories for studying astrophysical plasmas and dark energy; and the development of transformative technologies in ultraviolet optics, detectors, computer chips, and ion propulsion. Hakeem Is the president-elect of the National Society of Black Physicists Get Hakeem’s Book: A Quantum Life: Follow Hakeem on Twitter https://twitter.com/hakeemoluseyi Find Hakeem’s article on Medium Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. Connect with me:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating   Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  J oin my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php   Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php  A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/  Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Produced and Edited by Stuart Volkow P.G.A Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another exciting episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring yours truly Dr. Brian Keating and my friend and two-time guest, Dr. Hakim Olushei. Hakeem was on last time to talk about his book, Quantum Leaps, a journey from the streets to the stars, involving his evolution as a scientist, but also as a human being, from essentially a kid on the streets dealing drugs to Stanford University's PhD program and working on solar physics and a person. obtaining multiple patents and technology in the semiconductor industry. But today he's on for a different reason. He's talking about his work to really restore a somewhat tarnished legacy of James Webb, the namesick of the James Webb Space Tulscope. You may not know this in all the buildup to the James Webb's launch and unfurling and first images that are coming up and so exciting.

And stay tuned to the Into the Impossible podcast on YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating channel, because we are doing some breaking news as it comes out from the Webb telescope. But James Webb himself was a controversial figure. There's some that say that he was deeply involved in the so-called lavender scare that attempted to ostracize and punish people from the LGBTQI-plus community back in the 50s and 60s. And Hakeem demanded an explanation as a member of a minority group himself as an African-American physicist. very prominent one. In fact, the current president of the National Society of Black Physicist.

Hakeem sought as his duty to see if this reputation deserved to be burnished instead of tarnished. And today's episode describes the kind of very fascinating and courageous undertaking that he sought out to really reveal whether or not Webb himself had this bigoted past. and what he found surprised him and it'll surprise you. Hakeem's faced a ton of backlash for this. So I encourage you to shout out to him if you listen to this episode. Find him on Twitter, Hakeem O'Shea of links to it in the show notes. He deserves your support. He's a courageous individual.

He's a brilliant individual. He's not just a spokesperson for science. You see him on TV all the time, but he's also a top-rated scientist, educator, thinker, and leader. now as the president of the National Society of Black Physicist. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode. And if you do, reach out to me, let me know some takeaways you've got. I'm on Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating. And as I said, we're going to have new images, new data, exciting new releases coming from

the web, Space Telescope. The Event Horizon Telescope has a big announcement next week. Stay tuned. I have some insights into that as well. Hope to have Shep Dolman back on the podcast as well, the director of the EHT. So for now, sit back, relax, and enjoy this. journey into the impossible with Dr. Hakeem O'Shea and answering the question, whether or not the James Webb Telescope should be renamed. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic. In the news lately, the James Webb Space Telescope. So talk about that. What did you investigate? Why was it worth your considerable, valuable time? And what was the ultimate outcome of that? Right, right. So I, you know, there's anything, you know, I don't use the word hate a lot, There's one thing I hate. It's injustice. Okay. So I saw this article in the summer of 2015 with the title, Chinasa name Observatories after Biggits in Forbes.com.

And I was like in shock. I was like, oh, no, what? You know? And so I immediately did a little Google search to see what I could find. And the only thing I could find was an article that had been written five months earlier by David Savage in the Seattle newspaper where a reader had, a reader of his column had said, hey, I looked at this James Webb

Wikipedia page, and it looks like this dude was horrible and they're naming a telescope after him, right? And so I'm like, oh man, it looks like it might be true, but still, I don't really see any real data. So let me go

into this Facebook group we have called Equity and Inclusion in Astronomy and see what they think. And I go in there and sure enough, it looks like everybody accepts that this is the case, right? And there was a call in there. People were saying, someone should confront NASA. Someone should confront NASA. So guess what I did in 2016? I took a straight to them, right? Not the top. You don't always

want to go to the top because if you go to the top, you know, you got to go under the top to figure out what the situation is. Yeah. And then determine whether or not you go to the top. All right. So I approach an executive and approach the head of the telescope and neither had heard of these allegations. And they say, look, give us everything you got. And I gave them everything I had. And they said, all we see is accusations.

We don't see any real data here. Would you mind looking into what happened? So I'm like, sure, I took it very seriously. So I connected with the librarians and archivists at NASA. headquarters who connected me with people historians, NASA historians, and people at Johnson Space Center. And this one guy who was doing a PhD in history on James Webb at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and working at NASA Marshal Space Flight Center. And none of them had heard of this stuff. Okay. So we're like, wow. But then they started telling me about his

behavior at NASA in the 60s. And they were just like, you know, it looks like a completely different guy. And I'm like, what the heck is going on? So, you know, there were very specific allegations. very specific. He said this thing in Congress. He made this statement. He led this effort. He initiated this effort. So I work with these historians and archives and librarians. And we figured out, no, he didn't. It's a case of mistaken identity. Everything that you say had happened happened. So there is a book called this book right here, Tward Stonewall, right, on my show. Yep. So this book is Towards Stonewall, Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World. So in it, and in the Wikipedia page, the author says that, oh, the Undersecretary of State said this thing in Congress in January, 1950, January of February. And so Webb's title was Undersecretary of State. But it turns out there were other people with a very similar title, Secretary of Management, Undersecretary of Administrate, right, things like that, right? So it wasn't Webb who said it was a guy named Purifoy, okay?

And so then I said, okay, clearly he was not, he didn't do exactly what he's being accused of. But what did happen, really, at the State Department, and what did he do, if anything, in this particular effort? And what did he do generally, right? And I got the answers to all those questions. And I put it in the article, okay? So the people who actually did this, right? So this thing called the lavender scare is real. All right.

So here is how it unfolds. But anyway, here's what happens. You know the phrase no good deed goes unpunished. So, you know, me and my small team, we uncover it. Oh, this is great. It didn't happen. So here's how I think of it. You know how there's people wanting to pull down Confederate statues?

Yeah. So imagine there's these rumors of this person. They're horrible. They, you know, murder, slave, enslaved, people. and did this and the other, did that and the other. And every African-American in the community who walks by it's like, I hate that thing, right? Then some white dude in the community comes along and goes,

you know what? I researched that guy. Turns out he didn't do that. But not only that, he's done things that look like the opposite of that. Wow. So I published this work. And the small cobble of colleagues,

the media are like, But here's what Hakeem doesn't understand. Are you familiar with the Mott and Bailey logical fallacy? I probably committed it, but no, I don't. What is that? So here's what it is. It has to do with medieval war. So you have this courtyard, you know, your walls, right?

And so if a large army comes, chance they'll make it through the wall and into the courtyard, which is indefensible. So they would retreat to the Mott, I think, which was like a tower on Hill and these things can be impregnable, right? So the Mott and Bailey logical fallacy is you go out on something that doesn't make sense, right? It's been proven false. And so you fall back to something that feels like it's easier to defend, but still treat it

like it's the first thing, right? So they're like, oh, he was in charge because, you know, he was the Undersecretary of State. Number two at the State Department. He was running the State Department, right? And if this happened in your organization, you are responsible. However, there is a lot of scholarship on this, and it's completely false. And here's a book about James Webb.

And in here, his entire career is described. Okay. And so that is completely not true, that statement. So anyway, what happens is I published this article, and these astronomers go on what can only be called a disinformation campaign. This is after the 2021 article? Yeah. I wrote my article January 2021. Yeah.

The next day... I'll have a link to that, yeah. Yeah, they go on to Twitter. You know, he started, you know, saying, oh, you know, it's a case of he's complicit, right? Now, the word complicit didn't show up before my article. It was like, he led these things. Right. He said these things.

Intributable, yeah. Yep. Right. So now you've done your Motten Bailey switch. Yeah. Okay. The important thing here is that they held now a set of new specific allegations. And they are based

on the hole that I left in my article. And I would tell you what that hole is. There is a place in there where I said the only thing that ties Webb to these events is a memo from Carlisle Humusine. I don't know what was the reason that he gave him this memo. It appears to be to bring him up to date on the situation of what they've been doing. But that's not what's important for this article right now.

What important is in that article he gives the history of how this whole thing unfolded. And so with these other sources that I've used to show how it all unfolded, it tells a cohesive story. Now, the very next day, a fifth person outside of their group, and you

can see this on, there was an article written the next day by one of the authors of the Scientific American piece with the title, The Straits are here to save us. So I have two things to say about that title. Number one, I've never publicly disclosed my sexuality. Right. Thank you for assigning me one. Yeah, they're gendering you. I've seen you with your

partners as they were women. And I'm going to say, you call yourself queer and I've hung out, been there with you and your husband. Like, you know, it doesn't show. I could be as you don't know what I am, right. But you assign me that. You're assuming, right. You're assuming, right? And then the second thing is, damn straight I'm here to save you. Because I noticed a long time ago, a trend. White people that were my friends would come to me, Oh, Hakeem, if you heard what I hear,

dude, you would, right? And I noticed, hey, when I hear somebody saying some homophobia is usually in a room of heterosexuals. When I hear somebody being misogynistic, is usually in a room of men. And so there was an event that occurred where a male professor at my university

said something about our one female professor, and I didn't say anything. I just remained silent. And I knew that it was just, you're unjust and whatever, right? And it bothered me so badly that I bowed to myself, that would never happen again. I'm not going to be a safe space, right? If you want to bring your isms into my, I'm going to let you know, right?

Not here. We're not rolling like that, right? Your way of thinking is not the way we're doing things, right? So, yeah, I am here to save you. But anyway, the thing that they found that I did not find in the book, which is considered the sort of like authoritative source by David K. Johnson

called the Lavender Scare. He has a passage in there and it's necessary to read it. So here are the actual memos from the Webb Truman meeting that occurred on June 22nd, 1950. What happened is David K.

Johnson, so he says Undersecretary St. James Webb met to discuss how the Holy Committee and the White House might, quote, unquote, work together on the homosexual investigation. Truman told the undersecretary, quote, he was sure we could find a proper basis for cooperation, unquote, and agreed that Webb and two White House aides should meet with Hoey

to establish a modus operandi. That's how he wrote it. Now, let me tell you what you get out of that. Number one, they met for the purpose of discussing the Hohy Committee. Number two, this statement, worked together in a homosexual investigation, establish a modus operandi, sounds like an open-ended help us to design how we're going to do this. Yeah. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.

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While supplies last, pricing valid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. see Home Depot.com slash price match for details. So first thing is, if you look at his, at the articles they put out and things, they hold up this meeting like,

he had a meeting with Truman. We see that he had a meeting with Truman. It's guilt by association. Well, what it is is they're trying to say, you know, it's like there's a sound effect. You know, he had a meeting with Satan. It's not Truman.

It's not guilt by association. It is that it's a hot, super high, it's the highest level. Right. So he must have been involved. But here's the thing. Truman and Webb met regularly since 1946.

Webb ran an agency called the Bureau of Budget. And he weren't, you know, you ever heard of this phrase, economic indicators that they used to, Webb invented that. Oh, wow. He was, yeah, at the Bureau of the Budget. And he and Truman were so close that Truman told the Secretary of State Dean Atchison, when he got reelected,

we're putting Webb in as the second guy at the Department of State. You don't choose them, I'm choosing them. And Webb was like, what? I don't have any foreign policy experience. He's like, that's not what you're there for. Webb was what you would call like a bureaucrat nerd, right? He's like, in our foreign relations, we need some organization and yada, yeah. And this is quoted in Powering Apollo.

So Webb's job was about foreign relations and policy in a tough time, right? Now, here's the other thing. Now, let's look at the actual, what actually happened at meeting. They didn't meet to discuss the Hoy Committee or anything like that. They had their regular meeting. So the first topic they discussed was, Charles Spofford. And then they discuss

What else did they discuss? General Richard Marshall. And they discuss the state of the Vogler case. And then what happens? Webb informs Truman. By the way, Senator Hoey asked me to talk with him, to bring a message to you and have a meeting with him. So here's what it actually says.

is, I informed the president that Senator Hoey had wished me to find out how the committee and the executive branch could work together on the homosexual investigation. You see, Howie asked Webb. Hey, can you see the victim, the record was on a homosexual investigation? Very different from Truman and Webb. Conspired, right? wrote under quote. Right.

Right. And he, the president, advised me to say to the senator that he was sure we could find a proper basis for cooperation. But we're not, we still haven't talked about what we're talking about cooperating on, right? And this is where it gets to it. He, again, President Truman, approved a suggestion that Mr. Murphy, White House counsel, Mr. Springorn, the White House liaison to the Senate, to the Senate Hohy Committee, and I see Senator Hohy on Saturday not to discuss in modus operandi to discuss the necessary problems involving this cooperation. Interesting. Very different.

Yeah. What are those problems? It's in every document. Even David K. Johnson talks about the Lavender Scare. It's in the Humal Sign memo. At every turn, the Senate was trying to get personnel files of the people who had been investigated for being a homosexual. And so the executive branch was resisting turning that over because it could be used as political bludgeon. Right.

Right. So let me tell you how things actually unfolded because the true complicitnesses, is with American society. So what happens is John Purifoy gives the Senate testimony in January of 1950, and they're pressing him the senators

on people that have been kicked out of the Senate, excuse me, kicked out of the Department of State. Now, this is after they had a, is it, I forget the guy's name, Blake or something like that. There's some person who was turning over documents to the Soviets.

that was in the State Department of State. So it was sort of like, oh, we got spies and there was a couple other spy affairs. So the context of the moment was really crazy. So it resulted in Truman's 1947 loyalty order, but he's like, why did you kick these people out?

Purefoy, resist, resist, resist. And then he says they kicked them out for, quote, unquote, being homosexuals, right? What happens next? Public outcry from the conservative parts of the nation. What? This is what's in the state department?

so politicians did what politicians do. There was already a Republican senator, Wary, who was already pushing this going back. That's in a Hummel Sign memo. But now he does a new investigation to see if they should have a committee. And that's talked about in the Livenger, scare this congressional investigation committee. Like the most recent example of something like this is the Benghazi committees, right?

Something like that. It's a Senate investigation of state department, right? So they get their investigation, and the guy who's leading the investigation is a guy named, plant is a guy, you know, is Senator Hoey. So David K. Johnson record that quote someone is saying that Hoey nearly fell out of his window. It's a sort of affair. I don't want any part of it. And so what ends up happening is he, I want to get the exact same language, because basically,

what happens is that Hohy doesn't even run the Hohy committee. Here's what it says. This is from the Lavender Scare. As with many congressional investigations, the driving force behind this Hoy Committee's investigation of homosexuals was its chief counsel, Francis Flanagan. Hoey's discomfort and ignorance regarding the subject only increased Flanagan's responsibility. That the investigation was handled behind closed doors further in hand.

his power. Eliminating, anyway, here's a Flanagan quote. I handled that investigation. Flanagan boasted when later question about the homosexuals and government inquiry. Flanagan managed the research effort, chose the witnesses who would testify before the committee

and wrote the final report. Flanagan would later remark, if the hearings had been public, I'd have made a worldwide reputation as a great investigator of homosexuals. So the whole point here is they try to place this meeting. So what happens is after,

so Webb meets with Truman, Webb informs Truman. Hoy he asked me to show up. The way they write it is, the two White House folks go with Webb. Webb's the main guy going. They're coming with him. That's not how it read.

It says he approved a suggestion. that Mr. Murphy, Mr. Springer, and I attend this meeting. So they do. And there are these documents that come out of it that say what they talked about. What did they talk about? And by the way, David K. Johnson, this last year, because of this information campaign,

has been quoted many times in the New York Times and other places saying, Webb was not a leader of this in any way. And there's even an interview you can get it from 2004 online from University of Chicago press where he goes, you know, completely through. Webb hadn't absolutely nothing to do with this.

Now let's get back to this notion that he was in charge. He was in the line of command, you know, in the chain of command and he did nothing. All right. So let me tell you something. Every year I would get an annual evaluation when I was a professor. And I told you that we had one woman in our department. And when I was in Florida, I saw workplace misogyny like I had never, blatant like I had never seen before my life. Yep.

All right. So every time. I had an evaluation or if I was in a meeting, you know, I frequently had conversations with the department head and the dean. They asked me, what can I do better? I would say, listen, you are the leader. The leader determines the culture and leads the meeting. It's up to you to stop this. And they all, you know, right?

But I spoke out about this every chance. Is there any record of me speaking out against it? There's no record of that. No. No one would ever know, right? And here's the thing you can't do. You can't say, you know, I got seven black friends, right? To show this without a racist.

You can't say, no, but there is proof against, you know. So anyway, the point is that here's a quote from Powering Apollo. Here's what it says. It's titled Losing Influence at State. So basically, the idea that I'm putting here is that, number one, James Webb was not in charge of State Department, Dean Atchison was. And as number two, you have only as much power as number one gives you.

Seeds. Yeah. And if you only have one job to do, that's the job you're doing. So here's what it says. Because, anyway, while he participated of Webb in foreign policy discussions, represented the department at ceremonial and social functions and made certain decisions when Atchison was out of town, he was for the most part of supporting player, Webb.

After his prominence and influence as budget director, Webb found the undersecretary's job constraining. As, quote unquote, number two, he had only the pieces of the action, Atchison left him. And so it goes on to how he was into science and technology and that's what he went into. But there's more, right? So we're talking about Atchison style. Oh, but you know what? statement in here. Webb had spent

much time mending congressional fences. A debt with legislators, legislators, he was the primary force at state in getting funds for various programs the department supported. Even he, however, could do little to affect the gathering storm in Congress over loyalty security

issues in the state department. Webb was powerless in the State Department. He resigned his position because he was powerless, right? So what ends up happening is here's another statement about the relationship between Webb and Atchison. All right. So Webb was looked at us being some sort of philosopher king because he was all into policy and bureaucracy and stuff. And so here's the quote,

no philosopher king would challenge Atchison's judgments. Webb's interests for organizational purposes meshed with Atchison's for maintaining his own role as the dominant policymaker within the department. Right? Yeah.

You know, so they give like no context at all. And anyway, let's get back to the whole. subcommittee. So what comes out of the Holy Subcommittee? So the one document that's known to history is a document that Himalcine gave to Webb. And Humolstein is definitely one of the bad actors in this.

As is Purifoy, as is Flanagan, as is Wary, as is the Democratic Senator Hill from Alabama who joined with Senator Wary from Republican from Nebraska to make it a bipartisan congressional effort backed by the American public, a conservative American public. Right?

So what happens? We're at a time where the Korean War starts the same week. Right? And that's Webb's only job is foreign policy. And he gets consumed by that, but he asked to attend this meeting. So he attends this meeting, and the readout is there. It says they talk about whether or not the hearings would be closed or open, public or private.

They talk about what to call for witnesses in terms of doctors to talk about homosexuality. but the key thing was, y'all ain't get no personnel files from the State Department. Wow. So a memo is put out, and that memo has four elements that guides the State Department's interaction with the Hovey Subcommittee, the Congressional Subcommittee. What are those four elements? Element number one, Dean Aston and James Well would not be involved in this whatsoever. They will only be informed of major events, and even though. then only when necessary.

Item two. To the extent, oh, and by the way, Humal sign will handle everything. He will be the single point of contact, the single spokesperson, because he was a guy actually running it. He's a guy who wrote the homophobic memo that gave the history of the effort, right?

It's true. Where was a carrier and brought that memo over? But, you know, he had nothing to, you know, he was doing a political job that had nothing to do with the actual effort. Right. So the second thing is, the second element is to the extent that Humol sign needs advisement, we're creating this five-person committee,

and here's who those people are. Item number three, we will share some statistics with you. Item number four, you will get no personnel files. And that's it. Webb's gone. So think about this. Think about this. You're doing this job.

A guy is running a committee, a Senate committee to do something that he doesn't want to do. And he asks you, do, can you come talk to me about this? There's been the schism between the executive. branch. There's this problem about dealing with, you know, these personnel files. Let's work this out together. He attends that one meeting and 70 years later, people say you initiated it, you ran it, you were a homofold. You know, it's crazy. It's insane. And it just keeps, perpetuating and they just cite each other. I'm reading an article from Nature magazine last year, late last year. Yeah, and it was, oh, well, the critics say this and critics say this. And

that he was influential and he could have, he could have been a part of it. But I don't think it makes him the right choice. This Rolf Danner and astronomer at the J.C. Well, listen, man, what there, everything they've said is 100% false. He had a meeting with Truman. He regularly had meetings with Truman.

He supported the Hoey Committee. No, he didn't. He attended a single meeting that Hoey requested that he attend. And then he sent a document, a memo. The agreement was, I would not be involved in this at all. Then they say, yeah, but you were there and you didn't speak out. Really? How do you know that? Right.

So my thing is this. So this is the first time I'm speaking on this, except for this one CNN thing I did. And the reason why is I wait until NASA made their decision. Yeah. When they went out and they said all these things, let me tell you what the worst part of this is, right? Well, before I let me say this. Remember I started off talking about that Confederate soldier and, you know, what if this scenario? Now, I think to myself, if that was me and I had held that sort of animosity for

that stature all my life. Even when I got the truth and that person didn't do that, I still wouldn't be eager to unhate them, right? Yeah, it would take some time, right? Yeah. So I tried to be understanding sympathetic, right? And so I even suffered, you know, I even put it in my book, right? So I was raised with a mother and a sister. And I had feminine behaviors and characteristics. So I was called a sissy all throughout my shot. And by the way, you might not know this. But if you want to wear your hair as an afro and your hair like mine, you had to wear it braided a lot, right? So here I am with these bright eyes. And eyes, you know, this brain.

I looked like a little girl, right? I'm acting like a little girl. So, you know, I was getting the hell beating out of me by everybody. So I'm like, okay, let me be, you know, let me be understanding here. Yeah. But not only what began to unfold next was something that I did not expect. So what happened is another astronomer said, hey, man, I thought you and one of these people had a good work in relation because you were in the same research collaboration.

I was like, yeah, I thought so too, but it seems like they hate me now after this article. It's like, let me see if I can mediate this. Then this person sends me a screenshot where one of the authors of those articles, one of the two leaders, says, ask Hakeem why he left Florida Tech. And so I called him, what's that about? And he made it clear to me.

That person has made some very horrible allegations against you. And my response is, I don't care. I live my life. I'm public. Everybody knows who I am. What I do. You're going to book about you. You're making drug. I mean, it's not. I'm not. So I completely ignored it until August came and I got a call from my dean, my former dean at Florida Tech. His name is Dr. Hamid Rasul. And he says anybody is free to contact him on this matter. But he told me he was having a conversation with another of his colleagues from another university. And he says, hey, wasn't Hakeem a part of your faculty?

He's like, yeah, well, we're going to invite him for this particular thing. But one of the young astronomer women spoke up and said, hey, didn't, you know, certain, certain happen. And my ex-Radillo's a man, a very, you know, very principled man of honor type guy, right? He's like, what? No, not Hakeem, you know, right? And so so many members of the faculty, so many colleagues have told me this. And then when I got, when it was announced that I had gotten this faculty position, you know, this. named a faculty position at GMU.

One of the authors had this Twitter rant where they actually publicly use certain words. And then another astronomer sat down with me. I mean, let me tell you the three things they're saying, man. All of them 100% true, untrue. Oh, please edit that. All of them are 100% untrue. Yeah.

Because, you know, so here it is. you do this to the dead, and now you're doing this to the living. And so, you know, I don't feel the heat. And the reason why I don't feel the heat is because, you know, I've diversified my life. You know, I'm not just in the world of physics and astronomy anymore, right? And so, you know, you can't harm me through that world, is their thing.

But my colleagues, you know, are like, they're outraged, you know. They're like, dude, you should do this and I don't do anything, right? But here's the crazy thing about it. So at the end of that article I wrote in January, and my article was a TLDR. You know what that means? Yeah, too long. Too long? Didn't read, right?

So it was a long article. At the end of that article, I lamented on how these false allegations got so far. And I talked about the authors, the journalists, who wrote the two articles, and I talked about their sources, one of which was the book towards Stonewall. And so it turns out that one of the source for the Forbes article is an astronomer. And that person then went on their Twitter and said, oh, it's all an attack on me. All right. Now, let's look at it. I didn't mention a person's name.

You got to read all the way to the end of my long article to find that I say, hey, these two authors and these two sources are wrong. The only person I named by name is the author of that book, Fort Stonewall, right? So you would have to read to the end of my article, then go back up to the link at the top to that article, go read that article, and then get to the end of that article to find the person's name. That is a weak hit piece. If that's your intention, man, you're not going about it right. And so then they claim the victim and then go on and attack whisper campaign against me. with the most horrific of allegations. And so in the NSBP, the women point is out to me.

These allegations, Hakeem, don't you realize that this is what have gotten black men killed in America historically? Right. These same people that did the disinformation campaign on web have been doing that. Right. In silence as well. Like a smear campaign. To the messenger who did the research. Yeah.

Innocent, right? But the thing is is that if you read what they've written, they also attribute intention to me, right? Oh, trying to exonerate Webb. No, I'm not. I'm trying to find out what happened. And things like that, right? And oh, here's another one. Let me ask you, Brian, have you ever been working on something and a colleague said, hey, read the paper by Olushai?

And then you go read it and then you end up citing it in your document? Yeah. Of course, right? Yeah. Do you ever cite the person who told you? No. No. So here's what happened. Unless it's a referee, right? Right. That's a referee, right? What happens is the day after my article comes out,

people start contacting me out the yin-yang, okay? Several web scholars and people who worked at NASA with Webb in the 60s, okay? And one of these web scholars pointed me to the archive where I saw that that memo between Humosin and Webb was because of this meeting. I didn't yet have these documents from the National Archive of the meeting. So this person also told me, hey, don't tell anyone that I gave you this because they tried to pressure me in the past. and I could find no evidence to support that. I don't want them on my back again.

So what do they do? When they write their article about the straits, you know, or hear or save us. That's right. Yeah, they say, well, look at what Hakeem did. We tweeted the archive location, and then he wouldn't change his article and didn't cite us for telling him what a primary resource is.

I'm like, you usually only do it from primary resource, and I didn't get it from you anyway. I got it from this other person, right? And so it's really crazy. And if you look, you know, and so, you know, it's so insane that they, you know, create a lot of narratives that are false. For what purpose is it to drive, to discover the truth and uncover the truth about the situation? Because I'm thinking, whew, you know, the Confederate statue guy actually wasn't a Confederate, yay. And not only that, we got a lot of evidence that they did great stuff, right?

to me, which meant it's a tragedy to falsely accuse anyone. It's several orders of magnitude worse if they're a good person doing good things for humans. So that's what I was arguing. So the main argument, I think, against Webb, not against Webb, but for Webb. So the first thing about Webb is, so I got to give you one last thing. And this is about Webb's, you know, about him in bureaucracy. because here's the thing. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprise. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Webb had a hero. So they write about, here's what they say.

I'm trying to find it where they talk about Webb and his nerdiness around I didn't have it marked. Anyway, the point is, is that, you know, if you read Powery and Apollo, you will see that they mention how Webb read everything he could about administration and bureaucracy and learn. You know, you read the giants, right?

And so just like someone could ask me, oh, who's your favorite physicist ever? Webb had a favorite giant thinker of administration. It was a woman who in the early 20th century lived in a same sex relationship. openly. Mary Parker Follett. And every chance he got Webb was lauding Mary Parker Follett. Now, one thing about being a member of one of the lower rungs of the hierarchy ladder, you know, is, you know, you can have straight up racists that love LeBron, right? Because, you know, you fit in certain roles. But one role that a person who has an ism never gives, you know, never gives is intellectual power, right?

That is not, you know, not them. He's not going to work you up, right? Yeah. They have open animosity and typathy for, right? Yeah, exactly. But here's the other thing, right? At the exact same time, you know, when Webb was in the, but, you know, just as they were doing that in, in the state department, as that was beginning,

Webb was running his own agency, the Bureau of Budget. Shouldn't he have been doing that there if he was doing it in state, right? When he have, you know, so, so anyway, there's so much to it. So I know that was just like a buh, but I have another article to fill all the holes and show the reality of it in its full context. And it is a complete unnecessary wrong that has been done. Substantiated by an independent, you know, NASA Research Committee that also looked into this, his, you know, whether or not it could be problematic or whether or not he could be. So here's the other thing about that. another thing that's funny about how

if you look at those articles, especially the first ones, they're like, hey, but he's not even an historian. Don't listen to him. Here's a real historian. Here's what they said. But then you go out as an astronomer and do this campaign, right? Like, listen to me about history. I'm a non-historian. Don't listen to that non-historian.

But here's the thing. I didn't do it alone. I did it with a guy getting a PhD. I did it with NASA historians, archivists, and journalists. I mean, not journalists, librarians. And they say this to me. They're like, Hakeem, we're so glad you're involved in this.

We don't want to be publicly recognized because we see this like the moon landing, right? There's nothing we can do to convince the conspiracy nuts that, you know, it's real. And if we put our names on this, it's going to look like an inside cleaning job or whatever. So it's on you. So what I did is I waited, you know, more than a year to after I left NASA. So it's clear that it's me and not NASA who's doing this. You know, I wrote the entire thing myself. It's independently on Medium.

Yeah, I'll have a link to that. Well, you know, it takes a tremendous amount of courage. And that's not really surprising to me, but based on... I knew it was a no win. Yeah. Yeah, right. Right. It was the right thing to do.

So, you know. And you gave the right analogy. I mean, I'm Jewish. If I had, if there was some, you know, test, you know, something that was testimony to some, some, you know, Nazi or something that I'm not comparing the two. But still to think about that, I would have certainly a lot of misguided feelings if it turned out that I was also a member, you know, if I was in charge of at least revealing or didn't reveal something true that was inconvenient or uncomfortable and then later,

you know, condemn for doing that because the narrative that people want to believe. Anyway, we talked a lot about this. Let me say one last thing. Yeah. Overwhelmingly, the response from the community has been positive. This small group of people are savvy, smart, media savvy. They did what they did and drove a, you know, a large movement. But within physics and astronomy, people were like great job.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, and that's true. And of course, the telescope was not renamed. It was discussed. And after a thorough investigation by NASA, they decided not to do it. It has now been renamed. But, you know, and you'll still see these, you know, kind of contentions out there.

And they're always, you know, kind of uncontested necessarily and don't have the thoroughness of research that you have. And, you know, that that's their prerogative, that people have other things they want to do with their life. I wonder if the family of James Webb has been in touch with you or anybody else. Absolutely. We're close now. In fact, they, there was going to be event when the first date, December 15th, well, not the first date, but you know, December 15th. And so they wrote to him and they were like, yeah, man, you know, NASA gave us a couple of tickets to attend this event at Goddard and we asked them for a third ticket for you to come with us. We're family now in a way, right? But so many people reached out to me, not just the Webb family. They're like, why would you do this,

dude. You know, who are you? I'm like, look, to be honest with you, I got nothing in it. I could care less about Webb. What I care about is the fact that people are looking at, you know, I imagine what it would be like if, you know, David Duke, and every day I got to hear that, the David Duke Observer, or every do it. You know, that would drive me crazy, right?

So I knew that members of the community were feeling some way every time they had to hear this name, you know, and so I was going to do one thing or the other. To be honest with you, I know that I don't know until I know, but if I had a bias going in, it was assumption that it was real. It was true. Yeah. Right. And I was going to be like, I've shown you what he did.

Now get him out of here. Seems plausible, right? What happened, what I discovered was the opposite of that. And what I'm going to do? I'm going to be like, okay, this is great, right? Because now we don't longer have this one way or the other, we're getting rid of the problem, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And it's not, you know, and so it, what, what I'm going to do. I mean, to me, man, really, you know, someone said this on, on Twitter. It's, it's really like professional misconduct in a way to incite the community around the lie and then to, you know, do a whisper, smear campaign. Against them. Yeah. You know, and, yeah, it's, it's. No, I always, you know, I was saying when there's internecine fighting, you know, between, say, with Jews fighting against Jews, I would say, like, we have enough problems with the rest of. of the world, like, hating on us.

Why don't we have to hate on each other? Right. And nobody cares, really, right? Like, one of the things that I saw, for example, you know, there was two black scholars, Michael Eric Dyson and, what's the dude's name? Cornell West. And they wrote these long essays attacking each other. And I'm like, dude, nobody cares.

Y'all care. But, you know, it's kind of like, you know, I'm going to write a long essay and put it out to the public, so everybody can be a part of this. It may be tweeted. Yes, I may tweet it. Oh, no. Yeah, nobody cares, right? So I'm not, you know, I'm just continuing all my path doing what I do, right?

Well, I also look at these people, you know, in the black community, in the, in the homosexual community, lesbian, gay, bisexual, however you want to call it. And I find, you know, I do a lot of interview that happens to be. I have a lot of African-American. I think I've had more African-American scientists on this podcast than any podcast I'm aware. I'm just, and I'm not like proud of it. I'm not saying, oh, pat me on the back. I'm such a good white ally. I think that's demeaning, actually. I think, you know, the day you need me as an ally, you know, like, you're doing just fine, you know, and, and I do need you as an ally, right? I'm like, but I'm not supporting you because I'm not your ally because you're black. I'm your ally because you're, you're an impressive individual. You're a human being has accomplished a tremendous amount. Right. Who has merit, who has, who has courage. And those are the rarest qualities, Hakeem. And I do feel like, you know, it's funny because I was like walking around my son on a walk. We take a walk with one of my kids. And I was like, I'm talking to a guy today and his name's Hakeem.

What do you think that means? And he's like, let me think about that. Does it mean smart? And I said, let me think about that. Why would it mean smart? And he goes,

because in Hebrew, the word hacham, haqim means wise man. Wow. That is great. He didn't say, oh, he's Muslim or he's Arab. No,

he just said, he's a wise man. I thought that was so cool. And that's what I want to be associated with. So what I use, I call it Keating's razor, you know, about Akam's razor.

So I'll put out these, you know, I'll have interviews with people that are controversial. People on the right, on the left. And then I'll have the interviews with, and I'll get condemnation when I have someone on the right on.

But then I'll have an interview with it. Lesbian, you know, a bisexual, gay, transgender, queer, you know, black woman, say, you know, that's happened multiple times. And there'll be no love. There'll be no like, oh, thank you for being,

whatever, they need that. And I'm just like, how come you give me so much crap, you know, when if I have on somebody you don't like and you associate guilt by association, when I have on somebody who is in a community

that you're treasuring, that you're wanting to support. You show me no love. I mean, I don't, so now I don't let that go to my head anymore. I don't let the criticism go to my, man. Man, the thing, you know, people,

there's a variety. You know, I, we, I wrote a plane in 1999 when I was in Silicon Valley to, Heathrow from San Francisco. Yeah. And I was sitting next to an accountant from, for Johnson and Johnson.

And this man found accounting fascinating. And he talked to me about it. And found astronomy, Astrophics, what I was doing, not interesting at all. Yeah, boring. Guess how I found a accountant is funny discussion. Right. And I'm like, that's such an interesting thing, that humans are like that.

You know, we have this variety. And so, you know, I realize that. And so like for me, for example, you know, I'm of the type of, you know, it's hard to find me complaining. You know, I'm like, let's take action on this. I'm not going to, you know, I just find, you know, that, you know, so the point is that we're in a, a situation now. where people are empowered to speak out. They have a voice maybe for the first time. And I think that when you get a voice, you know,

the first thing, I think that there shouldn't be a single approach to any problem. All right? So, you know, there's a reason why you have the good cop, bad cop, you know, and things like that, right? Exactly. So I think that having a variety of approaches is the definite thing that you should do. but if you are going to I don't know man it's just frustrating to me

when you know I feel like people have the best of intentions and you know they want to do right but then sometimes you know you find yourself doing the wrong even though you really want to do right you know yeah I mean I just I don't

yeah my rule is I don't judge people on their intentions. I judge them based on their actions. And, you know, you can have good intentions all you like. But, but if you're not, you know, if you're not really kind of creating good and I'm a behaviorist, I believe, you know, your actions speak louder than your words. And his words are cheap. And especially in the air of social media, it's like, you can get amplified. I mean, remember, Mark Twain said in 1890s, you know, a lie can make it around the world, you know, twice before a truth even gets its pants on. But there's another statement, which is a lie don't live long. Right.

Yeah, there's a parable in Judaism where a man slanders, a rabbi, there's a name for it, and it's one of the greatest sins there is called Lashanhara. He's slander's a rabbi, and then he feels bad about it. But slander, he's telling the truth. He's not lying about the rabbi. He's just telling a rumor, gossip. And then he goes to the rabbi, and he says, I feel so bad about it. How can I make amends? And the rabbi says, very simple.

Go get a feather pillow. Guys are like, what the heck? All right, I'll get a feather pillow. He goes, here's your feather pillow. What am I done? no, go ahead and cut it open. Oh, all right, I'll cut it open. So he cuts it open and the feathers start blown away.

And the rabbi says, okay, you're almost done. Now just go out and get all the feathers back. And the point being, it's like you can't, like I always say to my, you know, words are like toothpaste, you know, once you use it, you can't take it back. Yeah. And so, you know, for me, this whole episode, it's depressing. It's demoralizing in a certain way. It's also hopeful because people like you do exist that can kind of blow the whistle for

truth and set the record straight, even when you start off, maybe not even inclined to take that tack from the very beginning. Well, that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this episode at the end to the Impossible podcast with my friend, Dr. Hakeem Alashei. You won't want to miss episodes that are coming up. Soon, we're going to have some really fascinating explorations of life in the universe and consciousness.

Dr. Philip Goff is coming on extremely soon. We had an interview with Richard Powers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. we'll have on Ed Young, another Pulitzer Prize winner in the not too distant future. And Sabina Hassanfelder is coming back on the show for her new book, Existential Physics. So I want to thank you for this journey and also to commend to you the books by our guest, Hakeem and others. And also my new book, The Dialogue on the Chief World Systems. Actually, it's not my book. It's Galileo's a 3090-year-old book that I just happened to record, my friend Carlo Revelli,

Luccio Pichorillo, Frank Wilchuk, Carlo Rovelli. I already said Carlo. But he's so good, we name him twice. As well as Jim Gates and Fabiola Gianati, you won't want to miss this audiobook. You can get it wherever audiobooks are sold or on my website, Brian Keating.com. I hope you'll come to my website,

Brian Keating.com, backslash list. Join my monthly magic mailing list where I send out messages every Monday and news around the universe things I'm up to. And I hope you'll also leave a review a rating. You can do a rating on Spotify and Audible.

But you could also leave a review on iTunes, and I thought I'd read one to you that I've received recently from someone whose name is Like a Mist. And Like a Miss says, this is intellectual inspiration. It's hard to say what it means to know, but when I listen, it makes me want to understand. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Like a Mist. Another listener, Sukhuhi, says never boring and never repetitive. I used to listen to a wide range of science podcast.

Over time, most became boring, repetitive, and uninteresting. Brian's Into the Impossible Podcast is a glowing exception. I love his guests and his ability to elicit insights that never stop. They'll never stop learning and listening when you listen to this podcast. Thank you very much, everybody. I wish you would do the same. You could find it on iTunes. Just go on your Apple Podcast app and look for my name, leave a review.

Give it an asterism. Five stars. No fewer, like some members of my family do. But we'll leave that out for now. So for now, I hope that you are doing well, enjoying this mid-spring season. And I can't wait to bring to you the upcoming great guest on the Into the Impossible podcast. So for now, I hope you have a magical week. Until next time, this is yours truly.

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