Hi, As I wrote yesterday, I fell a little behind. So going with quick shares. Luckily, I set a lot of these up ahead of time just for this kind of situation.
Sadly, what is presented here is true.
Thanks for tuning in.
Study: Conservatives Hate Science (All Of It)
Breaking news, a study published this month in Nature Human Behavior has found that American conservatives hate science. This news comes as a shock to everyone who has spent the past several decades not born yet. The researchers told the Associated Press that they hope this finding helps kick start their next project, determining the specific biomes in which bears shit.
Okay, sorry, sorry everyone, I’ve been wanting to make a video about the current Republican war on science but every time I sit down to say anything, there are a thousand new aspects to it, and to be honest I really need another vacation because the good vibes have run out from the one I took…three months ago.
Anyway, I’ll stop being mean about this study because it’s not JUST about how conservatives distrust science, even though that’s the headline of the press release for it. They actually found several interesting, and more depressing, aspects to this conservative personality trait that we already knew about. For instance, we’ve known for decades that conservatives hate science that contradicts their worldview, which, yes, is most of all science. Conservatives are more likely to reject evolution thanks to being taught from an early age that dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by Satan to trick us; they reject cosmology because they were taught a magical fairy man made everything in the universe in six days, even though making days is literally one of the things he had to do; and they hate climatology because a bunch of oil companies paid Rush Limbaugh to tell them everything is fine and the world isn’t getting warmer and even if it is it’s not our fault and even if it is our fault it’s good actually, don’t you like going to the beach and sitting by the sea on warm days? Well now the warm days are in October and the sea is coming to you!
But this study showed that the Republican plan to politicize all of science has had even greater success than anyone thought, because conservatives don’t even trust the science that does conform to their worldview. In a survey of nearly 8,000 Americans, conservatives distrusted all 35 different scientific professions they were asked about, including fields like industrial chemistry, because now, after decades of propaganda, they believe that all of science is a “leftist hobby” and that universities are havens of leftwing bias.
But wait, there’s more! The researchers attempted some interventions to see if they could get the conservatives to budge, like profiling prominent conservative scientists or discoveries that are in line with conservative “values,” and fucking nothing worked. The distrust is now so deeply ingrained in conservatives’ sense of self that it’s going to take a heroic effort to get them to do so much as admit that maybe there’s some value in knowing what the weather is going to be like tomorrow.
This is just the inevitable result of decades of special interest groups getting more and more money, using it to buy more and more power, and then chiseling away at whoever is pointing out a reality that is inconvenient to them. I’ve mentioned Big Oil pushing propaganda about climate change, but there’s also the gun lobby. Back in the ‘90s, CDC-funded research showed that keeping a gun in the home increases a person’s odds of being murdered by close friend or family member, so the National Rifle Association responded by lobbying to completely eliminate the CDC department that funded the study. That led to the Dickey Amendment in 1996, which forbade the CDC from funding any research on the dangers of guns, which lasted for more than 20 years and now when Americans talk about the recent mass shooting we have to clarify which one we’re talking about. We literally have mass shootings at our memorials for other mass shootings.
As Katherine J. Wu wrote in The Atlantic back in February, that Republican-backed legislation didn’t JUST slow down research during those two decades. The impact was much, much worse, because for twenty years scientists were dissuaded from going into that field of research due to knowing they would struggle to find funding. People didn’t want to be anywhere near the topic, because any association with it could result in the loss of funding for research that wasn’t even related, and so when the Amendment was finally lifted and funding began again in 2020, there was no one ready to restart the research.
To make matters worse, Trump isn’t simply demanding that funding be revoked for those currently studying the topics targeted by the special interest groups that control this administration, but he is actively disappearing research that has already been published. US Attorneys are sending letters to journal editors demanding to know if they accept “competing viewpoints,” and I’m not talking about social science journals, here, or even those focused on sex and sexuality. I’m talking about Chest, the Official Publication of the American College of Chest Physicians, who study things like, you know, lung cancer. Sorry, chest physicians, but now you have to give equal time to my “alternative” theory that asthma is a psychosomatic illness children invent to get out of running laps in gym class.
The even worse news is that there’s a trove of research that isn’t being protected by random journal editors. The US government funds and hosts a lot of studies on their own sites in order to ensure they are freely available, like this study published just last September that found that immigrants commit far fewer felonies than US citizens, and undocumented immigrants especially. Probably because, you know, they’re undocumented and they would very much like to stay here.
But if you try to view that study on the Department of Justice’s website, you can’t anymore. Nor can you read the helpful summary of it, without using the Wayback machine. If you try to visit the link where it was once hosted, you just get this notice reading "The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance. During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
This is directly beneath a large banner with the NIJ’s slogan on it: Advancing Justice Through Science.
That’s just one of many studies that people are realizing have been conveniently memory-holed from official government websites, forcing people to find them elsewhere or using Archive.org. Bluesky user @rtollert found examples of disappeared studies about countering violent extremism, violence in high schools, human trafficking, and community-based crime prevention.
We can expect the state of research in every field under attack to resemble that of gun control following the Dickey Amendment, but much, much worse. With this Trump administration, we’re going to see the same result in every area that special interests have politicized: gun control, climate change, birth control, abortion, women’s health in general, HIV/AIDS, and of course, transgender care just to name a few.
If you are in college learning to research any of those things, don’t bother doing it in the United States because you will starve in the gutter. Or be killed in a school shooting, one or the other.
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- Days ago: MOM = 3618 days ago & DAD = 272 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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