The GOP has always treated science as a smorgasbord. Evolution is wrong because it contradicts Bronze Age superstitions, but nuclear physics is fine because it gives us bombs to make our dicks bigger. Well, except that radioactive decay part because it tells us the Earth is way older than 6000 years. See the part about the supremacy of Bronze Age superstitions.
But all of that was of concern mainly to evangelicals. Even the Catholic Church made its peace with Darwin a long time ago. Things really accelerated when climate science became A Thing. What it said threatened some Very Big Money and, as Sinclair Lewis wrote in his book "How I Ran for Governor and Got Licked," it is hard to convince someone of the truth of something if their income depends on their believing the opposite. The GOP was forced to deny wider and wider swathes of physics and chemistry to maintain the fiction that it was just natural variations. Toward the end of the 1990's, they began to cherry pick and massage the data to make it seem to be the opposite of what it was. For instance, for a few years around the turn of the century, right wing media got a lot of mileage by showing graphs of global average annual temperature that started in 1998. As it happens, 1998 was an anomalously huge temperature spike, a big outlier. If you extend the starting point even a little bit further back, you can see that, and you can see the temperature after 1998 continuing on the same steady upward trend it was following before.
And then McConnell and then Trump took over the party, people to whom lies and truth are indistinguishable. And we have reached the final end point of this process -- science is just an opinion, no more or less legitimate than any other opinion. The only truth is ideology, and you select your opinions to fit around that.
About 6 months ago, a video, Plandemic, began circulating of a person named Judy Mikovits. Mikovits believes that the COVID virus was made in a lab by Anthony Fauci who stands to get filthy rich off the vaccines needed to treat it. This claim is now an article of faith in the Trump administration. It came perilously close to be aired on the nightly news on the hundreds of local TV stations owned by Sinclair Media.
Judy Mikovits was a scientist until she reacted very badly to what happened to a paper she published linking chronic fatigue to a mouse virus. This was shown to be a laboratory error by subsequent research. Mikovits was eventually fired and took a ton of confidential documents with her from her employer, for which she was in jail for a short time.
Mikovits has since become a champion for believers in medical conspiracy theories, basing claims linking the same mouse virus to autism, Parkinson's Disease, multiple sclerosis and cancer on other retracted papers or on no research at all, and claiming she had been jailed by the influence of the deep state and Big Pharma. Mikovits has spoken at anti-vaccination events. She has claimed that retroviruses have contaminated 30 percent of vaccines.
She is totally off her rocker, but she makes a claim that is politically useful, therefore she is a credible scientist. We'll cherry pick that part and ignore the rest.
Even more egregious in this regard is a video currently making the rounds. It is from a group called America's Front Line Doctors, and claims that masks are useless in preventing virus circulation and hydroxychloroquine is a proven cure. Trump Jr.'s Twitter account was suspended for peddling this video.
The doctor in the video is indeed a doctor. But being a doctor does not insulate one from being either stupid or crazy. In the past, this same doctor has previously claimed that alien DNA is being used in medical treatments and that “reptilians” and other aliens have infiltrated the US government.
But that's OK. We choose the part we want to believe, the part that is ideologically consistent, and ignore the rest.
You can do that with a pundit's opinions. You cannot do that with science. It is all of a piece, and you can't throw out one part without discarding the entire thing. The same physics that allows you to make nuclear explosives also requires constancy of the radioactive decay rate, makes the field effect transistors in your cell phone and computer work, as well as the MRI machine your doctor uses. If you throw out the radioactive decay part because it contradicts your received superstitions, then you have to agree that all the rest is accidental, and that we don't really understand how any of it works. We've been able to engineer those things purely by coincidence.
But that's OK if your epistemological position is that there are no facts, only opinions. And the only problem with that is that nature doesn't give two shits what you think about anything. She's going to do what she's going to do, whether you believe in it or not. So the temperature continues to rise and the infection rate continues to climb, not because we're wrong, but because nature obstinately refuses to bend to the needs of political reality.
Who does she think she is anyway?
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