John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, explains how distrust of science has colored every important issue and is deployed by big money donors. Every important debate these days is undermined by propaganda and suspicion of science.
He writes:
Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World, by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez, starts with two of the three biggest threats to humanity – the climate crisis and pandemics. Then they describe the “third leg to that tripod,” a network of anti-science institutions which is on the way to bringing “the collapse of civilization as we know it.”
That may sound extreme but both have a sterling record in the fields, despite being attacked by rightwingers; Mann is an environmental scientist and Hotez is an expert in pandemics.
Mann and Hotez describe the five “P’s” that are undermining our future. The first two Ps, plutocrats and petrostates, were the original founders, funded by fossil fuel elites, like the Koch brothers, to protect their profits from government regulations.
I should have known better, but it wasn’t until I read Science Under Siege that I realized how and why the plutocrats also “had a huge financial stake in fighting medical science during the pandemic.” I had long known about their attacks on clean air and drinking water, in addition to fending off the victims of the pollution. But, I was unaware about how these were interconnected.
Mann and Hotez then document the roles of international petrostates, as well as the Texas petrostate. They estimate that around 40,000 Texans died because they believed the petrostates’ propaganda and refused Covid vaccines.
Mann and Hotez then explained how elites promoted the “pros,” now known as rightwing media “influencers;” the propagandists, the think tanks that make up falsehoods that they present in papers that look like scientific research; and the fake news press.
They also criticize a number of mainstream journalists and commentators in newspapers like Washington Post and New York Times, explaining that they “often fall victim to [a] sort of false framing, what we call performative neutrality, where anti-science will be placed on an equal footing with the consensus of the world scientists.”
They conclude with the history of why 75% of Americans cannot name a living scientist.
Science Under Siege follows the same dynamics I’ve seen since the 1990s when social and cognitive science came under siege. At first, I assumed that we could bring data-driven researchers, funded by the “Billionaires Boys Club,” and traditional education scholars together.
I repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to explain to smart data-driven researchers, who didn’t know what they didn’t know about public education, why their methodologies for real world policy issues was inappropriate. The issue wasn’t what data-driven approaches “can” do, but what they likely “will” do. The most common reply was that isn’t what I was hired to do.
Worse, the big money donors also hired skilled propaganda providers, who demonized teachers. Having previously been a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood, I saw them borrow the “pro-Life” approach of slandering the supposed type of women who would seek an abortion. They applied it to teachers who supposedly didn’t care enough to hold students to “High Expectations” and “No Excuses.”
Even worse, “astro-turf” think tanks, funded by foundations like the Koch brothers, spread this PR campaign in order to push privatization.
To take a recent example, advocates for the “Mississippi Miracle” push the Big Lie that Proficient NAEP test scores are “grade level.” Actually “Basic” is closest to grade level. But privatizers send the false message that up to 90% of urban school students score below grade level, meaning those schools were irreparable broken.
That led to the claim that reward-and-punish accountability is the only path to literacy, even though so many social and cognitive scientists had long predicted that that learning culture would more likely to undermine reading for comprehension.
Worse still, you can’t improve the highest-challenge schools, like those I taught in, without building a team effort.
And guess what?
Similar attacks are being launched against our team players, such as medical and mental health providers, housing advocates, and higher education, etc. They are being targeted by Trumpists, the Koch brothers, Project 2025, etc. in the same way public and higher education is being assaulted by privatizers.
Similarly, I love the NYTimes, but I was especially upset by commentaries during the COVID pandemic, often written by people who I highly respect but who didn’t know squat about school cultures and who, for instance, would proclaim: When Trump was Right and Many Democrats were Wrong. with the subtitle, “Children have suffered because many mayors and governors were too willing to close public schools.”
As Mann and Hotez explain, “It took centuries to build the leading scientific infrastructure in the world here in the United States. And it’ll only take years to destroy it. And once you destroy it, you’re not going to rebuild it.’
They call for “urgency” and “agency.” Today, Science under Siege makes an urgent call for a fight against disinformation that is “infecting” our public schools. They call for investments in media training for young people so they do not succumb to fake news.
And, if we cannot protect the culture of agency that protects higher education, scholars will be driven out of science for generations to come.
In other words, if we cannot come together to defeat the tripod of disinformation by those seeking an “anti-science empire,” humanity will undergo extreme suffering which could be extremely long-lasting.
Diane Ravitch's blog 