Throughout history, authoritarian governments have insisted that science be subordinated to government policy, often with significant consequences. Examples include:
- Soviet Union (under Stalin): Stalin's Soviet government enforced the subordination of science to its political ideology. Most famously, Stalin's Soviet government promoted Lysenkoism, a politically driven agricultural science that rejected Mendelian genetics. Dissenting Soviet geneticists were persecuted for standing up for science. More than 3,000 Soviet scientists were dismissed, imprisoned or executed during this period just for teaching consensus genetics science.
- Nazi Germany: The Nazis promoted racial pseudoscience to justify its discriminatory policies and rejected theories like Einstein’s relativity as "Jewish physics."
- People's Republic of China (under Mao Zedong): During Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution the Chinese communist government insisted that science and education had to serve the political needs of the Communist Party. This led to the persecution of scientists who were deemed politically incorrect or counter-revolutionary by espousing consensus science that contradicted the regime's ideology.
- Italy (under Mussolini): Mussolini’s Fascist regime sought to align Italian scientific research with its political goals. Scientists who did not conform to the regime’s ideology were marginalized and persecuted.
- TFG's Project 2025: Project 2025 is the de facto party platform for MAGA Republicans. Project 2025 advocates the elimination of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Since the 1970's, the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services have been charged with updating science-based nutrition recommendations to Americans every 5 years. Revisions are suggested by a scientific advisory committee staffed by Ph.D.-level experts with decades of specialized experience in nutrition science. www.dietaryguidelines.gov/. During this period, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee reviewed scientific evidence, held 6 public meetings, and solicited public input, ensuring a thorough and transparent process. These Ph.D.-level experts have been making science-based conclusions that undermine MAGA Republican support for monocultural agriculture practices of large agribusinesses that are contributing to climate change and soaring rates of obesity-related disease. Project 2025 quite explicitly says that MAGA Republicans want to suppress this scientific information and with a boost from the SCOTUS conservative majority, clearly plan to do so.
Project 2025 is riddled with assertions that contradict consensus science and the chapter on agricultural policy is no exception. This is to be expected in an enterprise with 34 authors and 2 editors, NONE OF WHOM have graduate training in the medical sciences, unless you count surgery as a medical science. The lawyer-author of the chapter on agricultural policy evinced scientific naivete when he justified eliminating the Dietary Guidelines for Americans by complaining that "…there is constantly changing advice provided by the government, with insufficient qualifications on the advice, oversimplification to the point of miscommunicating important points, questionable use of science, and potential political influence." If the 10 editions of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans were as useless as the author implies, why is it that studies consistently show that adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans reduces risk of heart disease , cancer and all-cause mortality?
MAGA Republicans generally deny that human activities have contributed to climate change and as a corollary do not believe the consensus science that agrees that current agricultural practices are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.
MAGA Republicans generally deny that multinational food companies are responsible for Americans' 42% obesity prevalence rate and oppose government efforts to educate American families about science-based optimal dietary patterns that are associated with decreased risk of obesity (e.g., the Mediterranean dietary pattern). Quite laughably, Project 2025 explicitly assumes that Americans can get their nutrition advice from their health professionals. Medical school nutrition training is notoriously limited to the nutritional requirements of patients with specific diseases like cystic fibrosis and fails to address what healthy families need to do to optimize their nutritional health.
SCOTUS accelerates suppression of science. An accelerant to the MAGA Republicans' drive to subordinate government scientists to ideological beliefs was the recent SCOTUS conservative majority decision to overturn the 40-year legal precedent known as the Chevron doctrine. Congressional legislation instructing the Executive Branch to promote the general welfare through rule-making often fails to include operational details that only specialists are privy to. Historically, the Chevron doctrine protected the judgments of Ph.D.-level specialists with decades of specialist experience when they suggested specific rules to achieve Congressional public health mandates and these rules angered important major donors to Congressional campaigns. The courts have historically deferred to the scientific expertise.
Government scientists will now be muzzled. Thanks to the recent SCOTUS conservative majority decision, agency scientists will now be muzzled unless they resign and will be powerless to oppose government policies designed more to please agribusiness campaign donors than to protect American consumers. The $1.1 billion dollar U.S. food industry contributes importantly to political campaigns. The ultimate deciders of consequential public health and safety-related government policies will now be people trained in law, not in science, and selected for their allegiance to political ideology rather than because of their understanding of science. The campaign to muzzle "the deep state" is designed to prevent consensus science from interfering with business plans of multinational corporations for whom profits are more important than human health.
