Every story on the top of HUFFPOST today is about the pandemic including the lead story (here):
The subtitle of “Donald Trump Is At War With COVID-19 Science” is “The ongoing pandemic shows just how dangerous, and deadly, his continued rejection of science and expertise can be.” That and this quote from Mike Pence sums up the administration's attitude about science when it goes against their political agenda: “To be very clear, we don’t want CDC guidance to be a reason why people don’t reopen their schools.”
In January, 2019 Science Direct published Researchers Say They've Figured Out Why People Reject Science, And It's Not Ignorance; but this only explains why so many of Trump’s supporters accept his anti-science message.
So where is this denial of science coming from? A big part of the problem, the researchers found, is that people associate scientific conclusions with political or social affiliations.
New research conducted by Kahan showed that people have actually always cherry picked facts when it comes to science - that's nothing new. But it hasn't been such a big problem in the past, because scientific conclusions were usually agreed on by political and cultural leaders, and promoted as being in the public's best interests.
Now, scientific facts are being wielded like weapons in a struggle for cultural supremacy, Kahan told Melissa Healy over at the LA Times, and the result is a "polluted science communication environment".
Keeping in mind that the Science Direct article was published prior to the pandemic consider its conclusion: (Matthew Hornsey, is a psychology professor at the University of Queensland in Australia.)
Hornsey told the LA Times that the stakes are too high to continue to ignore the 'anti-enlightenment movement'.
"Anti-vaccination movements cost lives," said Hornsey. "Climate change skepticism slows the global response to the greatest social, economic and ecological threat of our time."
"We grew up in an era when it was just presumed that reason and evidence were the ways to understand important issues; not fear, vested interests, tradition or faith," he added.
"But the rise of climate skepticism and the anti-vaccination movement made us realise that these enlightenment values are under attack."
"But the rise of climate skepticism and the anti-vaccination movement made us realise that these enlightenment values are under attack."
With Trump and his minions what we are observing may not be a personal rejection of science. We don’t know what they really believe. They may all believe Anthony Fauci. If they don’t they are scientific troglodytes. If they do believe him their words and threats are a callous and calculated rejection of inconvenient scientific facts for purely political reasons.
Trump’s war on medical science isn’t merely rhetorical. Now he is threatening to cut off federal funds to schools that follow CDC guideline and don’t physically reopen.
The president isn’t just engaged in a cold war on science. He has turned it into a hot war. It is a war he is destined to lose. With a combination of narcissism and magical thinking he thinks he can beat a virus which has caused a pandemic that is as bad or worse than any other in recent history. (See “Comparing SARS-CoV-2 with SARS-CoV and influenza pandemics” in The Lancet.)
With the loss in his war with Covid-19 will come a a humiliating defeat come November. He’s trying to manipulate public opinion by a bound to be futile attempt to manipulate data about Covid cases and deaths. The real numbers will leak. Even more significantly before long everyone will have a first, second, or third hand experience with the disease.
In his march towards a second term Trump met an enemy he thought he could beat. To paraphrase Jim Croce:
You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Covid
Trump tugged (on Fauci’s cape), he spit into the wind (ironically), and he pulled (also ironically) on a mask he said made him look like the Lone Ranger...
Put another way, more and more Trump supporters will realize they’s been deceived and suffer the consequences they will think “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Enough of them will take this shame out on Trump when they vote. Because of this, assuming he avoids Covid himself, he will lose in a landslide.