"Science Is Fake" is a headline clearly designed to 'trigger the libs,' so it's the kind of thing we'd usually file as 'trying too hard' and ignore. Plus, Michael Knowles' job at the fracker-backed Daily Wire is basically to say outrageous, hateful, and false things for attention, so we're loath to give any to the click-bait-titled adaptation of his recent remarks to the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
But the speech is noteworthy in its honesty. Although Ben Shapiro, Knowles’ boss at the Daily Wire, has the catchphrase "facts don't care about your feelings," Knowles now admits to being "anti-science" when it comes to "coronavirus, gender, global warming, etc" and complains that conservatives pretend to base their political positions on facts! They’ll "recite a litany of scientific arguments for why hankies on our faces wouldn't stop a pandemic," Knowles decried, or say "'Nuh-uh, you're anti-science!' [before citing their] own statistics on sea levels and storms and temperatures.” (As if there are conservative and liberal statistics!)
Knowles is "sick of it" and doesn't "care if the libs call [him] foolish, or ignorant, or a knuckle-dragging troglodyte." He "will not play their game" or "worship their false god" any longer, instead openly proclaiming that "'Science' is fake" and that "conservatives may not be 'anti-science,' but we should be."
He then gives a nice history lesson that conveniently ignores the Scientific Enlightenment, misrepresents the scientific process, and otherwise confirms he's not just kidding about being anti-science, foolish, and ignorant.
But his speech wasn't stupid. Longwinded, wrong, and laced with anti-trans bigotry, yes, but not stupid. Because what he lays out is a worldview that many share, but few admit so proudly.
For Knowles, science is fine, but religious beliefs are better. And, of course, the ‘best’ beliefs are those that align with reactionary politics, are openly hostile to the LGBTQ+ community, and favor building literal racist structures (border walls) over being "woke" to structural racism. To top it off, Knowles’ anti-science arguments regularly reject the reality that fossil fuels are causing the climate crisis, reflecting the fossil fuel industry’s funding of both his employer and the larger disinformation landscape.
So what's the alternative to this horrifying political philosophy?
For that, we turn to Siva Vaidhyanathan at The New Republic who puts forward a vision for "a fully democratic, cosmopolitan republic that finally rejects white supremacy as an organizing American ideology... that values and strengthens deliberation as the chief instrument of decision-making [and that emphasizes] that we have a shared fate—not only as Americans but as humans on a threatened planet."
Vaidhyanathan further describes this idea as "a vision for the best possible America for this century, one that acknowledges that people, money, goods, and expressions are going to flow across borders and oceans, but that embraces justice and human flourishing as the ends of that process instead of morally vacant values like efficiency or productivity.” He argues, “We should imagine and promote an America that embraces 'xenophilia,' as cultural theorist Leela Gandhi advocates: a full embrace of the other, the foreign, the different, as something that adds value to life. It would mean escaping from the zero-sum idea of the other 'taking' something from 'us.'"
While there's a ton of other great stuff in Vaidhyanathan's piece, that's what really stuck with us. Because so much of the conservative propaganda and climate disinformation we see relies on the pretext of a toxic, resource-scarce, “us versus them” worldview.
And maintaining that mindset requires constantly fighting off reality, which is why it's also so fundamentally anti-science.
"Knuckle-dragging troglodyte" though he may be, at least Knowles is no longer pretending otherwise and instead admits his conservative feelings don't care about facts.