Why Does MAGA Hate Science?
Billionaires, conman grifters, and religious zealots don’t want to hear any inconvenient truths.
Against all the evidence of horrific, devastating weather around us, climate change remains “a hoax.” An anti-vaxxer–caused outbreak of measles now extends beyond Texas to 34 states. Republicans are doing all they can to shut down funding for medical research.
Why does MAGA hate science? Shall we count the ways?
Because scientific advances don’t discriminate between the “worthy” and those considered unworthy, and because some in the billionaire class think they deserve to live much longer than you do.
As they prep their fancy-schmancy bunkers or delude themselves that they can one day head off to Mars to escape their wanton destruction of the Earth, the billionaire bros know they can avail themselves and their children of lifesaving vaccinations and other health care services that they are putting out of reach for many of us.
But it’s not just the small (small-minded, small-hearted) wealthy elite of MAGA. Working people who choose to wear MAGA red caps hate science for their own reasons: it tells them things about disease and environmental destruction and, say, women’s reproductive health that they cannot bear to face. Scientific findings often do not jibe with their religious beliefs. If you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and were never taught how to distinguish between faith and knowledge, you’re naturally going to have a testy relationship with science.
By its nature of openness to new ideas, scientific inquiry exemplifies the secular worldview of liberals. Science levels the playing field. It’s woke. Scientists discriminate about the significance of evidence, but they do not discriminate about the significance of different human beings. (That is what the MAGA faithful think their religion is for — because Republicans have spent a long time perverting Christianity, too, to justify their greed and bigotry.)
From reading the writers of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson knew science was evening out the social playing field. In an article published in Smithsonian Magazine, historian Stephen E. Ambrose notes that amid all the contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson never relinquished his idealism about all men being created equal:
In his last message to America, on June 24, 1826, ten days before he died on July 4 (the same day that John Adams died), Jefferson declined an invitation to be in Washington for the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote, “All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.”
There’s the danger to those who consider themselves superior — by race, color, creed, or position on the Forbes annual list of billionaires — to the mass of men and women. Scientific advancements make us all more aware that we are all the same and should enjoy the same basic rights, to education, to health care, to civil liberties like voting, to freedom of and from religion, to reading whatever books or opinions we choose to read — the very things that the current occupant of the White House and his MAGA followers are working to take away from us.
Beyond the historical friction between science and religious beliefs (for which earlier scientists could be imprisoned or, say, burned at the stake), the main reason MAGA hates science is human-caused global climate change.
Former Vice President Al Gore famously called global warming an “inconvenient truth,” but Donald Trump persists in calling it “a hoax,” while defunding climate research, green technology, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The COVID-19 pandemic gave MAGA followers yet another reason to hate science, which they dutifully learned to distrust even more while watching “their favorite president” politicize every aspect of the response.
Apparently, millions would rather suffer mightily — or even die, as many of the willfully unvaccinated did in the pandemic — than admit they were ever wrong. It’s a sad aspect of human nature to feel we have such sunk costs in our often-wrongheaded opinions that we are willing to perish for them.
I was a biology major in college for a few years, vaguely premed, until I switched to journalism. I would not pretend to be a scientist based on that curtailed education, but I did spend 36 years in medical publishing. As a production editor and, later, as a submission systems manager, I came to understand the significant work of researchers and the selfless work of the many peer reviewers who help editors determine which studies merit publication. For many journals I worked with, the acceptance rates were astonishingly small.
MAGA conspiracy heads might call that publication process elitist — that people with good ideas are being kept out of the conversation. Most people recognize the process as separating the wheat from the chaff by culling out the many papers that, for one reason or another (poor design, insignificant findings), do not advance scientific knowledge.
But you don’t need any understanding of science to understand that what Trump and his Party of Grifters and Religious Zealots are doing to universities by withholding research funding is going to be economically devastating to this country and seriously disrupt the careers of researchers.
It’s impossible to gauge just how far-ranging and long-lasting the negative effects of Trump’s attacks on science will be.
Even worse will be the long-term effect, as with so many of MAGA’s anti-education initiatives or their attacks on nonpartisan civil service work. Students will shy away from careers in science. Just months ago, STEM courses for young students were viewed as being critical for the future of American ingenuity and enterprise, a big part of what has actually made America great. Now, it’s impossible to gauge just how far-ranging and long-lasting the negative effects of the Hey-Let’s-Bring-Back-Measles President’s attacks on science will be.
MAGA supporters don’t want to share “their” America with brown-skinned people and are fine seeing their leaders deporting and trying to scare off Americans (citizens or not) who build our housing, work in our hospitals, and pick and deliver the crops that feed the nation.
Leaving the European Union has cost the United Kingdom an estimated 6% drop in GDP — and that’s just so far. The result of what we are seeing with MAGA’s lust for more money to hire Gestapo-like ICE agents to deport our third wave of hard-working, tax-paying immigrants, beyond unimaginable human suffering, will be Brexit on steroids.
Ultimately, what our felonious, ever-grifting president is out to do is to destroy all expertise in this country. That’s what autocrats do. The man-child leader of MAGA cannot stand for anyone to question him when he lies about or suggests idiotic things about a pandemic, or revises the path of a hurricane with a Sharpie, or tries to rename a body of water. Statisticians tell him he is wrong to say that his “One Big Bigoted Billionaire’s Bill” is the most popular in history (it’s not). Historians tell him he is not the best president ever, as he so often claims, but the absolute worst.
Being questioned is why he hates journalists, scientists, and anyone else with a good education. Enjoying not being questioned is why he has surrounded himself with his Cabinet of White Nationalist Frat Boys, Sycophants, and Fellow Grifters — not to mention members of this Supreme Court who appear ready to hand him absolute power.
“American Robin,” a poem by Barbara Crooker featured this week in poet George Bilgere’s excellent “Poetry Town” newsletter, is about our inability to respond appropriately to the devastation of human-made climate change. But it applies also to all the anti-science, misogynist, racist, Dark Enlightenment nonsense coming from the right that’s going to rob you, your children, and your grandchildren of a financially and environmentally secure future.
One might read Crooker’s dismay at the American Robin’s thumps and thunks against her windowpane as a rhyme for the name of a certain infamous conman.
But that name should never be uttered in the context of any art — or science.
Note: This essay later appeared in Salon.
