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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE CURRENT WAR ON SCIENCE, AND WHO’S BEHIND IT  
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Diana Gitig
September 27, 2025
Ars Technica
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_ Two cutting-edge researchers examine the scourge of anti-science. _


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_Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That
Threaten Our World_
Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13: 9781541705494

We’re about a quarter of the way through the 21st century.

Summers across the global north are now defined by flash floods,
droughts, heat waves, uncontainable wildfires, and intensifying named
storms, exactly as predicted by Exxon scientists back in the 1970s.
The United States secretary of health and human services advocates
against using the most effective tool we have to fight the infectious
diseases that have ravaged humanity for millennia. People are eagerly
lapping up the misinformation spewed and disseminated by AI chatbots,
which are only just getting started.

It is against this backdrop that a climate scientist and a vaccine
developer teamed up to write _Science Under Siege_. It is about as
grim as you’d expect.

Michael Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania
who, in 1998, developed the notorious hockey stick graph, which
demonstrated that global surface temperatures were roughly flat until
around the year 1900, when they started rising precipitously (and have
not stopped). Peter Hotez is a microbiologist and pediatrician at
Baylor College of Medicine whose group developed a low-cost,
patent-free COVID-19 vaccine using public funds (i.e., not from a
pharmaceutical company) and distributed it to almost a hundred million
people in India and Indonesia.

Unlikely crusaders

Neither of them anticipated becoming crusaders for their respective
fields—and neither probably anticipated that their respective fields
would ever actually need crusaders. But they each have taken on the
challenge, and they’ve been rewarded for their trouble with
condemnation and harassment from Congress and death threats from the
public they are trying to serve. In this book, they hope to take what
they’ve learned as scientists and science communicators in our
current world and parlay that into a call to arms.

Mann and Hotez have more in common than being pilloried all over the
internet. Although they trained in disparate disciplines, their fields
are now converging (as if they weren’t each threatening enough on
their own). Climate change is altering the habitats, migrations, and
reproductive patterns of pathogen-bearing wildlife like bats,
mosquitoes, and other insects. It is causing the migration of humans
as well. Our increasing proximity to these species in both space and
time can increase the opportunities for us to catch diseases from
them.

Yet Mann and Hotez insist that a third scourge is even more dangerous
than these two combined. In their words:

It is currently impossible for global leaders to take the urgent
actions necessary to respond to the climate crisis and pandemic
threats because they are thwarted by a common
enemy—_antiscience_—that is politically and ideologically
motivated opposition to any science that threatens powerful special
interests and their political agendas. Unless we find a way to
overcome antiscience, humankind will face its gravest threat yet—the
collapse of civilization as we know it.

And they point to an obvious culprit: “There is, unquestionably, a
coordinated, concerted attack on science by today’s Republican
Party.”

They’ve helpfully characterized “the five principal forces of
antiscience “ into alliterative groups: (1) plutocrats and their
political action committees, (2) petrostates and their politicians and
polluters, (3) fake and venal professionals—physicians and
professors, (4) propagandists, especially those with podcasts, and (5)
the press. The general tactic is that (1) and (2) hire (3) to generate
deceitful and inflammatory talking points, which are then disseminated
by all-too-willing members of (4) and (5).

There is obviously a lot of overlap among these categories; Elon Musk,
Vladimir Putin, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump can all jump between
a number of these bins. As such, the ideas and arguments presented in
the book are somewhat redundant, as are the words used. Far too many
things are deemed “ironic” (i.e., the same people who deny and
dismiss the notion of human-caused climate change claimed that
Democrats generated hurricanes Helene and Milton to target red states
in October 2024) or “risible” (see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim
that Dr. Peter Hotez sought to make it a felony to criticize Anthony
Fauci).

A long history
Antiscience propaganda has been used by authoritarians for over a
century. Stalin imprisoned physicists and attacked geneticists while
famously enacting the nonsensical agricultural ideas of Trofim
Lysenko, who thought genes were a “bourgeois invention.” This led
to the starvation of millions of people in the Soviet Union and China.

Why go after science? The scientific method is the best means we have
of discovering how our Universe works, and it has been used to reveal
otherwise unimaginable facets of reality. Scientists are generally
thought of as authorities possessing high levels of knowledge,
integrity, and impartiality. Discrediting science and scientists is
thus an essential first step for authoritarian regimes to then
discredit any other types of learning and truth and destabilize their
societies.

The authors trace the antiscience messaging on COVID, which followed
precisely the same arc as that on climate change except condensed into
a matter of months instead of decades. The trajectory started by
maintaining that the threat was not real. When that was no longer
tenable, it quickly morphed into "OK, this is happening, and it may
actually get pretty bad for some subset of people, but we should
definitely not take collective action to address it because that would
be bad for the economy."

It finally culminated in preying upon people’s understandable fears
in these very scary times by claiming that this is all the fault of
scientists who are trying to take away your freedom, be that bodily
autonomy and the ability to hang out with your loved ones (COVID) or
your plastic straws, hamburgers, and SUVs (climate change).

This mis- and disinformation has prevented us from dealing with either
catastrophe by misleading people about the seriousness, or even
existence, of the threats and/or harping on their hopeless nature,
sapping us of the will to do anything to counter them. These tactics
also sow division among people, practically ensuring that we won’t
band together to take the kind of collective action essential to
addressing enormous, complex problems. It is all quite effective. Mann
and Hotez conclude that “the future of humankind and the health of
our planet now depend on surmounting the dark forces of
antiscience.”

Why, you might wonder, would the plutocrats, polluters, and
politicians of the Republican Party be so intent on undermining
science and scientists, lying to the public, fearmongering, and
stoking hatred among their constituents? The same reason as always: to
hold onto their money and power. The means to that end is thwarting
regulations. Yes, it's nefarious, but also so disappointingly…
banal.

The authors are definitely preaching exclusively to the converted.
They are understandably angry at what has been done to them and
somewhat mocking of those who don’t see things their way. They end
by trying to galvanize their followers into taking action to reverse
the current course.

They advise that the best—really, the only—thing we can do now to
effect change is to vote and hope for favorable legislation. “Only
political change, including massive turnout to support politicians who
favor people over plutocrats, can ultimately solve this larger
systemic problem,” they write. But since our president and vice
president don’t even believe in or acknowledge “systemic
problems,” the future is not looking too bright.

* Science
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* anti-science
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* conspiracy theories
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* The Republican Party
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