Why MAGA hates science so much

Against all the evidence of horrific, devastating weather around us, climate change is still a “hoax.” A measles outbreak sparked by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists now extends beyond Texas to 34 states. Republicans are doing all they can to shut down funding for medical research.

Why does MAGA hate science? Shall we count the ways?

Because scientific advances don’t discriminate between the “worthy” and those considered unworthy, and because some in the billionaire class think they deserve to live much longer than you do.

As they prep their fancy-shmancy bunkers or delude themselves that they can one day head off to Mars to escape their wanton destruction of the Earth, the billionaire bros know they can avail themselves and their children of lifesaving vaccinations and other health care services that they are putting out of reach for many of us.

But it’s not just the small — and small-minded, and small-hearted — wealthy libertarian or right-wing elite. Working people who choose to wear MAGA red caps hate science for their own reasons: It tells them things about disease and environmental destruction and, say, women’s reproductive health that they cannot bear to face. Scientific findings often do not jibe with their religious beliefs. If you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and were never taught how to distinguish between faith and knowledge, you’re naturally going to have a testy relationship with science.

By its nature of openness to new ideas, scientific inquiry exemplifies the secular worldview of liberals. Science levels the playing field. It’s woke. Scientists discriminate about the significance of evidence, but they do not discriminate about the significance of different human beings. (That is what the MAGA faithful think their religion is for — because Republicans have spent a long time perverting Christianity, too, to justify their greed and bigotry.)

From reading the writers of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson knew science was evening out the social playing field. In an article for Smithsonian magazine, historian Stephen E. Ambrose notes that amid all the contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson never relinquished his idealism about all men being created equal:

In his last message to America, on June 24, 1826, ten days before he died on July 4 (the same day that John Adams died), Jefferson declined an invitation to be in Washington for the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote, “All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” 

There’s the danger to those who consider themselves superior — by race, color, creed or position on the Forbes annual list of billionaires — to the mass of men and women. Scientific advancements make us ever more aware that we are all the same and should enjoy the same basic rights to education, health care, civil liberties like voting, freedom of and freedom from religion, and the freedom to read or otherwise consume whatever opinions or cultural works we choose — the very things that the current occupant of the White House and his MAGA followers are working to take away from us.

Beyond the historical friction between science and religious beliefs (for which earlier scientists could be imprisoned or burned at the stake), the main reason MAGA hates science is human-caused global climate change. Al Gore famously called global warming an “inconvenient truth,” but Donald Trump persists in calling it “a hoax,” while defunding climate research, green technology, NOAA and FEMA. The COVID pandemic gave MAGA followers many more incoherent reasons to distrust science, while watching “their favorite president” politicize every aspect of the response.

Apparently, millions would rather suffer mightily — or even die, as many willfully unvaccinated people did — than admit they were wrong. It’s a sad aspect of human nature to feel we have such sunk costs in our often-wrongheaded opinions that we are willing to perish for them.

I was a biology major in college for a few years, with vague plans of medical school, vaguely until I switched to journalism. I would not pretend to be a scientist based on that curtailed education, but I did spend 36 years in medical publishing. As a production editor and later as a submission systems manager, I came to understand the significant work of researchers and the selfless work of the many peer reviewers who help editors determine which studies merit publication. For many journals I worked with, the acceptance rates were astonishingly small.

MAGA conspiracy heads might call that publication process elitist, and claim that people with worthwhile ideas are being kept out of the conversation. Most people in the sciences, however, understand the process as separating the wheat from the chaff by culling out the many papers that for one reason or another — perhaps poor design or insignificant findings — fail to advance scientific knowledge.

But you don’t need any understanding of science to understand that what Trump and his party of grifters and religious zealots are doing to universities by withholding research funding will be economically devastating to this country, slowing scientific progress and seriously disrupting the lives and careers of many researchers, technicians, lab assistants and students.

The long-term negative effects of Trump’s attack on science, which are also part of the full-spectrum MAGA assault on education and the nonpartisan civil service, will likely be even worse. Students will be increasingly reluctant to pursue careers in science. Only a months ago, STEM courses in high school and college were viewed as critical to the future of American ingenuity and enterprise, a big part of what actually made America great. It’s impossible to gauge just how much damage will be done as we ban vaccines, deny climate science and make measles great again.

Many MAGA supporters don’t want to share “their” America with brown people who may or may not be citizens; too many of them welcome the persecution and deportation of longtime U.S. residents who put in long hours at child care centers, hotels and restaurants, construction and landscaping companies, hospitals and nursing homes, and in agricultural fields, doing the thankless and often grueling work of picking and delivering the crops that feed the nation.

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union — one of the worst self-inflicted wounds of recent political history — has cost the U.K. an estimated 6% drop in GDP so far. The probable result of MAGA’s lust to spend billions on hiring more masked, secret police-style ICE agents to deport hard-working, tax-paying immigrants, even if we look beyond the human suffering, will be a Brexit-level recession on steroids.

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Ultimately, what our felonious, ever-grifting president wants to do is to destroy all expertise in this country. That’s what autocrats do. The manchild MAGA leader can’t stand for any so-called experts to question him when he makes idiotic suggestions about public health proposes setting off nuclear bombs inside a hurricane or tries to change the longstanding name of a geographical feature to gratify his fragile ego. He wants to claim that his supposedly big and beautiful bill is the most popular legislation in history and that he’s the greatest president ever, and doesn’t want to hear egghead historians tell him otherwise.

Trump hates to be questioned — so he hates journalists, scientists and anyone else with the kind of education that encourages critical thinking. That’s why he has surrounded himself with an entire Cabinet of white nationalist frat boys, shameless sycophants and fellow grifters — not to mention a supermajority of right-wing Supreme Court justices who appear ready to hand him absolute power.

“American Robin,” a poem by Barbara Crooker that was recently featured in George Bilgere’s “Poetry Town” newsletter, is about our inability to respond appropriately to the devastation of human-made climate change. But it applies equally well to all the anti-science, misogynist, racist, Dark Enlightenment nonsense coming from the right that seeks to rob you, your children and your grandchildren of a financially and environmentally secure future. It begins this way:

Here’s that bird again, launching from the rhododendron,
banging his forehead on my living room window. Thump.
Thump. Does he see his own reflection in the glass
or does he see a rival, a threat to his nest? I hang
a black raptor silhouette in the middle square,
but that does not deter him. Knock yourself out,
I keep thinking. Next, I try cardboard, then a sheet
of newspaper smeared with its terrible
news. He comes back. Do I admire
him for his persistence or shrug
at his stupidity? Thunk. Thunk.

Read the whole poem; I’ll wait. One could read Crooker’s dismay at the American robin’s thumps and thunks against her windowpane as a rhyme for the name of a certain infamous conman turned populist demagogue. But that is perhaps unfair — to the poet and the bird.