Health, Science, and the Empire of Lies
Is disdain for rigorous inquiry the thread that connects MAHA and MAGA ?
When a lawyer with no medical or scientific expertise is advising a President with even less relevant knowledge to issue a warning about a drug he can’t even pronounce based on research neither of them understands, something is deeply broken. Making America Great Again appears to require a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war on science.
The War on Science
But why? The easy explanation is the regime’s unapologetic tendency to protect the vested interests of the oligarchs and their corporate patrons. Science has always been deeply inconvenient to business models built on burning fossil fuels or trashing the environment.
How then do we explain RFK Jr.? His frontal assault on vaccines certainly doesn’t fit a pro-business model. And his attack on RNA vaccines in particular strikes at the heart of one of the few genuine successes of Trump’s first term. But this exception reveals a larger rule.
The enemy in this blitzkrieg is not science.
The enemy is truth.
The War on Truth
Science, at its core, is a relentless, systematic search for truth. When you crave the freedom to weave your own, fact-free reality—to make the Epstein files vanish, to deny election results, to recast the January 6 rioters as “tourists”—truth-seekers become a problem. If your agenda depends on deceit, the scientific process itself becomes an existential threat.
For Trump, Kennedy’s disconnect from scientific reality isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Kennedy’s steady stream of wild assertions about public health simply helps condition Trump’s constituency to believe in bullshit. Recent polls found that Republicans trust the advice of RFK Jr. on medical issues in general (81%) and vaccines in particular (73%) at rates similar to their trust in their personal physician. How did we get here?
Three forces have brought us to this moment
Trump’s deceive-and-divide strategy
Trump has no regard for objective truth; he weaponizes falsehoods to divide us. His “alternative facts” convince the MAGA faithful that truth is a lie and that experts are part of a vast “deep-state” conspiracy. If you can get people to believe whatever you want, you can get them to do whatever you want.The rise of bespoke realities
This term, coined by Renée DiResta in and described in her brilliant book, Invisible Rulers, refers to the personalized worlds we now inhabit—individualized worlds built by social-media algorithms, fed by influencers and politicized “news” outlets, and no two exactly alike.SARS-CoV-2: the perfect political pathogen
The virus was uniquely adapted to the moment. It spread silently, mutated quickly, and killed selectively—deadly enough to sow fear, but not enough to motivate uniform compliance with public health measures. Confusion became controversy, and controversy became the fuel for both the Trump division machine and the outrage-amplifying internet.
The Scientific Community Must Respond
It may be tempting for scientists to continue to do what they do best, but we can’t research our way out of the current crisis. Ignoring this broad frontal assault on science related to everything from climate change to vaccine technology will have devastating, far ranging, irreversible consequences for public health.
We also must recognize that the current science communication played a central role in creating this crisis. We cannot fix it by tweaking and tinkering around the edges. It must be rebuilt from the ground up.
Instead, we need to focus as intently on the following as we do on research
Distill and disseminate.
Science communication can no longer be an afterthought. We must take full responsibility for explaining the best available evidence in language tailored to diverse audiences.Educate.
We must teach not just facts, but the process of science—why expertise matters, how evidence accumulates, and how to judge credibility.Create.
We need better tools to systematically assess the credibility of research and of those who produce it.Collaborate.
This must be a collective effort. The scientific community must harness the unprecedented power of the internet to connect and communicate to give collective voice to scientific consensus as effectively as it has amplified denialists.Advocate.
Scientists have been discouraged from entering the public arena for fear of “bias.” But if we devote our lives to understanding these issues, who is better qualified to explain them to the public?
To that end, I am joining with other members of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Accountability Journalism Institute to announce the launch of new organization. The Science Accountability Institute. will be dedicated to the five missions above: communication, education, creation, advocacy, and collaboration in defense of science and its search for truth.
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A healthy democracy depends on debate grounded in a shared understanding of reality. When the controlling party bends truth to partisan ends, it becomes a cancer on the body politic—one that corrodes reason, divides communities, and undermines trust in the institutions meant to protect us. Such manipulation will always be at odds with the rigorous scrutiny that defines science. Facts are stubborn things, and ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear. It only puts democracy itself in peril.
Here are the factors at play. First, those who see science as a threat to their traditional power structures.
Religious conservatives hate science and always will because science presents a view of the world at variance with what they consider to be the "truth". The universe and earth are very old, species came about through evolution, there was no global flood, and so on.
Businesspeople hate science in part because while it sometimes helps them to make money, all too often science uncovers inconvenient truths that interfere with money-making: cigarette smoking causes cancer, anthropogenic global warming is real, PFAS are neurotoxic, and so on. Also (science broadly considered, encompassing domains such as sociology and economics) presents a view of the world at variance with what they consider to be the "truth": trickle-down economics doesn't work, public goods are not always and everywhere better provided for by the market, low taxes don't always foster economic growth, and so on.
Political conservatives hate science and always will for a myriad of reasons. First, their prime constituencies are religious conservatives and businesspeople, and therefore they must cater to them. Second they hate, hate, hate bowing to scientists, who they see as lesser than them. They're used to calling the shots, and now they have to let someone else call them for them. Third, science (broadly considered, encompassing domains such as sociology) also presents a view of the world at variance with what they consider to be the "truth". Systemic racism and sexism exist, there is not equality of opportunity in the U.S., police brutality exists, trans people are not overrepresented in mass shooting events, and so on. Immigrants do not commit crimes at a rate equal to native-born citizens, and add more to the economy than they take out. And especially, that rich people are more "deserving" and thus merit having their wishes catered to, at the expense of the needy and marginalized.
We have seen an evolution in the response to science. First, these groups countered with pseudoscience: creationism, global warming denial, economic papers put out by right-wing think tanks, and so on, and political support for places where, according to them, people wouldn't be "indoctrinated" into thinking scientists knew what they were talking about such as conservative universities and Christian schools. The second was to attempt to discredit science altogether as a reliable empirical method for uncovering truth. Papers were gleefully bandied about concerning the "replication crisis" in psychology. Science is a human enterprise conducted by fallible people, of course, so conservatives seized on scientific missteps, imagined or real, of the past and present to try to convince people that science was almost wholly unreliable as a means of finding truth. (They "know" hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are cures for COVID.) Third, and most recently, is the attempt to simply use political power to crush science altogether. Defund the NIH, the NSF, the CDC, NOAA, and "woke" universities who refuse to bend the knee.
Second, those who gleefully vote for all of this. The constituency is heavily uneducated, cishet, and (mostly) white men. One of the reasons is, of course, they don't like being told by the left that they are ignorant, stupid bigots (which is largely true) and refuse to do the necessary work for personal change. But the other, and main reason, that needs to be brought out into the open is this: they aren't voting primarily out of a desire to make the world a better place, or even a better place for them. They are voting out of a desire for better access to and control of women. That's why they are anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-BIPOC. And anti-education and anti-educated people.
I could go on for 10,000 more words, but I'll stop here for now.
A terrific post. One small thing I don't understand is why all those presumably science-minded Democrats put so much trust in Big Pharma. From a fellow-physician and clinical/epidemiological researcher.