Hard to believe there were times when either political party regularly distinguished itself and alternately embarrassed the entire nation when it came to science. Or that for a few brief shining years in the early days of the Cold War, the US actually stressed science and technology.
But it would be short-lived. America won the space race, Nixon swept into power, and conservatives turned to exploiting the cold civil war that had been simmering for a century on the heels of Reconstruction. With that came a fierce brand of willful ignorance worn proudly like a badge of honor by bigots and idiots alike. And not just way down south, in Dixie.
This week those forces of ignorance struck again, savagely slashing funding from NASA earmarked for Earth Science on behalf of their billionaire paymasters:
As I wrote this morning, Republicans on the House Committee for Science, Space, and Technology passed a nakedly partisan budget authorization bill for NASA that drastically and brutally slashes hundreds of millions of dollars from NASA's Earth Science Division, which studies how climate change is affecting our planet.
Don't let anyone waste your time trying to convince you both sides are "the same" when it comes to science, that it's only the issues that change. Poll after poll shows progressives and independents are better informed and more in tune with the consensus of science on virtually every major issue
than conservatives. And by and large, the more conservative the person is, the more Fox News and right-wing talk radio he or she consumes, the worse the
person compares, on
everything.
That's not a coincidence. Conservatives have invested heavily in misinformation infrastructure for decades and science was one of their primary targets from the beginning. Since the cold war began to wind down more than 20 years ago, a handful of mostly former DoD scientists put themselves on the market, willing and eager to stamp their degrees on any zany nonsense that would pay. Over the years they've been joined by many more, and that nonsense is channeled through an impressive network of churches, radio, TV, and print media straight into the ears and eyes of conservatives who want to believe it.
We simply have nothing that compares to the carefully managed feedback loop of willful ignorance that has developed, we couldn't match it if we wanted to, and we don't want to. Knock pseudo-science when you see it, on the left or on the right, but there's no need to help out the usual suspects by exaggerating the influence of a few misinformed, stubborn people on our side of the aisle. Traditional media, wary of some vague idea of balance, already does that anyway.