Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Utah governor Jon Hunstman Jr., both successful Mormon businessmen, were alone in not kowtowing to the new antiscience fervor spreading among evangelical Republican Party activists. “Listen,” Huntsman said in a September GOP primary debate in California, “when you make comments that fly in the face of what ninety-eight out of one hundred climate scientists have said, when you call into question evolution, all I’m saying is that in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.” Huntsman plummeted in the polls.
Appeasing Republican primary voters while not sounding so absurdly antiscience that one alienated mainstream voters was clearly a delicate balancing act. The activists were being propelled into a sort of anticlimate frenzy by right-wing media organizations and radio that amplified ideas from organizations like the Heartland Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and the George C. Marshall Institute. Romney was forced to retreat from the affirmative stance regarding anthropogenic global warming that he had previously taken, eventually saying that “we don’t know what’s causing climate change.” At the Republican National Convention, he turned President Obama’s efforts to address climate change into a laugh line.
Lies Straight from the Pit of Hell
By late 2012, antiscientific rhetoric had become normalized in US politics. Public statements that once would have been considered ludicrous and career-ending were accepted by media and voters without challenge, mostly on the Republican side of the aisle, and mostly on issues surrounding climate change, contraception, and evolution. That’s not to say that Democrats didn’t have their own issues with accepting science they didn’t agree with politically—they did—but they weren’t running loudly against science the way Republicans were.
Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, waved his gilded Bible in a congressional hearing on climate change, declaring that “the earth will end only when God says it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth, this Earth will not end in a flood.” He added that “there is a theological argument that this is a carbon-starved planet.”
Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO), who sat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, was asked whether he opposed abortion even in the case of rape. He replied that “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” He could not explain what a “legitimate rape” was, and what little science there is shows that pregnancies from rape seem to run at around 8 percent, about twice the pregnancy rate from consensual sex.
Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA), a medical doctor who served on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, told a luncheon crowd that
All that stuff that I was taught about evolution and embryology, big bang theory, all that, is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives, individual. How to run our families. How to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.
That is the opposite of the idea Thomas Jefferson originally had in mind for the United States.
The Death of Evidence
“We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it,” AAAS president Nina Fedoroff lamented on a cool, cloudy February day in 2012. Fedoroff was attending the world’s most prestigious scientific organization’s annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, and she confessed that she was “scared to death” by the vast war on science that was spreading through the Western world.
As she spoke, the revolution was in full swing across the rest of Canada. Beginning shortly after taking power in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had imitated George W. Bush in his efforts to muzzle scientists. He and several other conservative members of Parliament had ties with top US Republican activists and elected officials, ranging from climate denier Senator James Inhofe to anti-tax activist Grover Norquist. In 2007, the Harper government established rules that required Environment Canada scientists to obtain permission before speaking with reporters, reducing their engagement on climate change by 80 percent. In 2008, Harper abolished the position of the National Science Advisor, and his administration soon began closing research libraries. The public didn’t seem to notice at first. Canadian scientists were the only ones really feeling the thumb or watching the destruction of knowledge, and eventually they decided they needed to do more to raise public awareness.
On July 10, 2012, five months after Fedoroff’s lament, thousands of scientists marched on Parliament Hill in downtown Ottawa to demonstrate against policies that cut science funding and prevented government scientists from speaking to the press, attending conferences, or even speaking to groups of high-school students without permission.
Wearing white lab coats or dressed all in black, they marched through Ottawa, chanting, “No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy.” On Parliament Hill, they held a mock funeral for evidence, with speakers delivering eulogies and describing how science was being threatened by the conservative, pro-extraction-industry government, whose members seemed only interested in research that served business.
“If you are fed up with the closure of federal scientific programs and muzzling of scientists, if you think that decisions should be based on evidence and facts instead of ideology, then please come out and show your support,” the scientists’ announcement said. Katie Gibbs, then a PhD student in biology, organized the rally and would subsequently set her career in science aside to lead the advocacy group Evidence for Democracy. “You can’t have a functioning democracy if you don’t have informed citizens, if you don’t have the facts,” Gibbs told me.
But the Harper government’s attack on science continued unabated. Fully 90 percent of federal Canadian scientists said they could no longer speak freely. Eighty-six percent said that when faced with a departmental decision or action that could harm public health, safety, or the environment, they did not believe they could share their concerns with the public or media without censure or retaliation. Research libraries were closed, and much of their contents—thousand and thousands of volumes—were discarded in Dumpsters. In 2013, there were eleven Department of Fisheries and Oceans research libraries across the country. By 2015, there were four, and scientists complained that the information they contained—critical historical data records—was no longer available, making it impossible to track how ecological measurements such as ocean temperatures and fish populations were changing over time.
But the antiscience wasn’t limited to conservative politicians seeking to quash opposition over environmental issues. Canadian scientists were also banding together to battle left-leaning antiscience from alternative-medicine providers who were giving doses of “Influenzinum,” a homeopathic alternative to the flu vaccine that has no scientific basis. Other community activists across Canada were worried about microwave radiation and so-called “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” which has no scientific basis, and had begun actively lobbying local governments to ban Wi-Fi. The beleaguered scientists formed an organization called Bad Science Watch to monitor Influenzinum, Wi-Fi bans, and other issues, saying that “the media has been all too willing to fan the flames of controversy and has contributed to a growing false uncertainty over the safety of Wi-Fi. As a result many school boards, libraries, and town councils across Canada have been called on by concerned citizens to limit or remove Wi-Fi networks.”
Worldwide Antiscience
By November of 2013 the antiscience cancer had spread to several other countries, most of them places like the United States and Canada that had heavy deposits