I am not understanding why he is getting so much hate.

1. The writer is pretty transparent here. If you start to question one universally accepted "truth", your mind opens up to the possibility that other accepted truths - like that US elections are safe and secure - might not be totally true, despite what all the experts have told you. I'm not exaggerating when I say he's literally asking you - the super smart well-read subscriber of The Guardian - to not think for yourself too much and please just let us honest journalists and academics guide you. Research is too much work for you, and you certainly wouldn't want to be mislead by misinformation. I honestly would not be surprised if this guy has intelligence agency connections.

2. Historians and anthropologists (to some extent geologists) in academia have always been self-important pricks who fiercely guarded their positions as the oracles of accepted history against apocryphal views, using all the political and smear tactics we notice the medical science establishment employing today since they unmasked themselves over COVID19. It's even easier in those fields than in medical research because the evidence is often more ambiguous and analytically derived. Rather than hard data telling you exactly what happens, you need well established "experts" to interpret the data and tell you what happened, like the Catholic church telling you what scripture says because you can't read.

I am not understanding why he is getting so much hate.

1. The writer is pretty transparent here. If you start to question one universally accepted "truth", your mind opens up to the possibility that other accepted truths - like that US elections are safe and secure - might not be totally true, despite what all the experts have told you. I'm not exaggerating when I say he's literally asking you - the super smart well-read subscriber of The Guardian - to not think for yourself too much and please just let us honest journalists and academics guide you. Research is too much work for you, and you certainly wouldn't want to be mislead by misinformation.

2. Historians and anthropologists (to some extent geologists) in academia have always been self-important pricks who fiercely guarded their positions as the oracles of accepted history against apocryphal views, using all the political and smear tactics we notice the medical science establishment employing today since they unmasked themselves over COVID19. It's even easier in those fields than in medical research because the evidence is often more ambiguous and analytically derived. Rather than hard data telling you exactly what happens, you need well established "experts" to interpret the data and tell you what happened, like the Catholic church telling you what scripture says because you can't read.