Neil deGrasse Tyson: Troll of the year

As I said, being conspicuous for duplicity and incivility in 2014 required a special kind of talent, the very type possessed by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Early in the year, Tyson began hosting Fox TV’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” a reprise of Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS tour de force “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.” Tyson seemed the perfect choice to moderate, and not merely because of his Ivy League academic degrees in astrophysics and his extensive writing, teaching, and consulting on space policy. Tyson reports a momentous encounter as a teenager with Sagan. One assumes that to be true, but given the whoppers Tyson told about George W. Bush — a man who directly elevated Tyson’s career — the empiricist’s mind wonders.

The first episode of the new “Cosmos,” which aired in March, included a touching tribute to the famed astronomer before veering into Tyson’s personal gravitational field: bashing Christianity.  He invoked 16th-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, whom Tyson describes as a “martyr for science,” supposedly because he was executed for embracing Copernicus’ sun-centered solar system and believing that the universe was infinite.

This is mangled history. Bruno was indeed burnt at the stake, but not over astronomy. A theologian, not a scientist, the friar arrived at his notions of outer space via faith and was accused in the Inquisition of eight charges, all but one relating to church doctrine. He was executed, in other words, for practicing magic, denying the divinity of Christ and the virgin birth. He also picked political fights everywhere he went. He was, in other words, Neil Tyson’s kind of guy.