The most notorious press conference Donald Trump ever held was the one in which he told a scientist in attendance to look into the possibility of using household disinfectant inside the human body to kill the Covid-19 virus. He had watched a demonstration of how the product worked on surfaces, you see, and he thought they hadn’t considered the possibility that humans could ingest it and achieve similar effects. That day, April 23, 2020, marked the last of Trump’s daily televised pandemic press briefings, and it may very well have been the last straw for many of those who voted against him just a few months later. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump told the public that everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was astonished at how well he understood the science. He mused that he probably could have been a doctor. Despite the utter humiliation of that famous press conference, the president remains undeterred in that fantasy in his second term. 

In September, Trump announced that pregnant women should not take Tylenol during pregnancy, claiming without evidence the drug is linked to an increased risk of autism. On Monday he donned his imaginary white coat again to issue an executive order changing the U.S. government’s recommendation for the childhood vaccine schedule — because he is convinced that the vaccines cause autism.

Neither of those assertions is grounded in scientific fact, and both have negative ramifications for women and children if they are followed. The recommendations to break up the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines into individual doses because today they “look like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” as Trump stated, are plainly absurd. Any association between these vaccines and autism has been thoroughly debunked, and all the major medical and scientific associations immediately issued statements that they would not follow these recommendations.

Trump is aided in his crusade to personally cure autism by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his loyal health and human services secretary and anti-vaccine crusader, who dutifully stood by his side on Monday and parroted the same nonsense. The new recommendations will likely be followed by millions of MAHA moms who have fallen down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation that Kennedy and Trump have been digging. But the pair are just the latest in the long line of hustlers, fraudsters and canny opportunists who have been working to undermine science in this country for more than a century. In fact, doing so is an all-American tradition.

Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business. While neither has openly colluded with the other, they have both furthered each other’s goals and ended up in a political alliance. One wouldn’t think these two disparate institutions would have much in common. But they share similar tactics: lying to their followers and customers for power and profit. And both have their reasons for rejecting science that interferes with their own interests.

Christianity and science have been in tension ever since the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. But for the most part, the tension was at least somewhat manageable, and both carried on in their own spheres. In the early 20th century, however, a new Christian movement formed that took direct aim at science on the grounds it constituted a threat to the belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, and the modern war began. 

In the beginning, this new movement was largely financed by a pair of Los Angeles oil magnates. Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society. The Stewarts published a book called “The Fundamentals,” giving the movement its name, and shipped copies all over North America at their own expense, literally spreading the fundamentalist gospel and influencing massive numbers of Americans to reject scientific knowledge wherever it conflicted with literal biblical interpretations. 

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Fast forward to the 1980s, and Christian fundamentalism had become a powerful political force as evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family aligned directly with the Republican Party, wielding huge influence on right-wing politics. In doing so, they signed on with the most powerful GOP faction, Big Business. Using their influence with their followers, they managed to help convince millions to doubt any science that interferes with the interests of huge corporations, and reject regulations and taxation to mitigate the problems that came with their products. 

Once again, the fossil fuel industry led the way. Another pair of brothers, Charles and David Koch, zealous libertarians rather than fundamentalist Christians, ran a global conglomerate that dealt in energy and chemicals, and they were determined to stop the growing consensus that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Like the Stewarts before them, the Koch brothers financed a massive campaign to convince people that the science was wrong, and they brought a lot of their friends in the industries along with them. 

In the 2000s, a tsunami of money was released into the political system to block climate legislation, particularly during Barack Obama’s presidency. This has shown no signs of stopping, despite mounting evidence every day that the planet is under increasing stress and people are starting to suffer in vast numbers. The result of these efforts is obvious: Less than half of all Americans now believe climate change is caused by human activity. Only 21% of Republicans do.

Science denialism comes from many directions, and unfortunately we are in a period where it’s flourishing. There have always been hustlers and snake oil salesmen, but today the internet provides endless opportunities for people to “do their own research” and find whatever feels right to them, so conspiracy theories have become the lingua franca of our society. Delusional narcissists like Trump and Kennedy, occupying powerful positions and spreading nutty medical advice, are now just par for the course.

Some of the medical and scientific skepticism is a result of people feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world and drowning in competing information. But make no mistake: Powerful societal interests are also benefiting from all this, and it’s not by accident. They have spent a lot of time and a whole lot of money creating this environment of mistrust and suspicion, each for their own purposes but sharing the same goal, and it’s paid off handsomely.

The post The gospel of science denial, from Galileo to RFK Jr. appeared first on Salon.com.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is under congressional scrutiny following an appearance before a Senate committee last week, in which the former National Institutes of Health immunologist was grilled by elected officials over his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment. 

The committee’s chair, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has not been shy about his scorn toward Fauci, who led the pandemic response in the first Trump and Biden administrations. Paul floated conspiracy theories that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, was leaked from a Chinese lab and that Fauci covered up this info. There is no conclusive evidence that the virus leaked from anywhere but nature, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from promoting such theories.

Seemingly at the advice of his lawyers, Fauci declined to entertain this political side show. Nonetheless, he serves as a convenient scapegoat for the ongoing public health failures under President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

As unfortunate as this sounds, COVID did not go away. The virus that sparked a global pandemic still regularly infects, disables and kills hundreds of people per week. Although it’s not anything like previous waves, right now cases are rising slightly across the country, especially in Alaska and Missouri, but also in California, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Waning immunity, viral mutations and a refusal for some people to stay up on vaccines are part of the reason why COVID is returning.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

This isn’t a pandemic anymore, according to experts, but that’s because the virus is now endemic — it’s a part of our daily lives like flu, HIV and other infectious diseases. Even once-eradicated diseases like measles are now all too common. COVID is also now a preventable disease. Vaccines, masking, improved indoor air quality and acquired immunity have all kept the virus at bay so that morgue trucks no longer fill the streets. Still, even a “mild” infection these days can be devastating and lead to long-term health problems.

But a big part of the reason COVID is endemic in the first place is because it wasn’t controlled early, like MERS and SARS-1 were, related viruses that never became pandemics. The first Trump admin completely botched its response to containing COVID, but now they can deflect from their past and current failures — including letting things like the cyclospora outbreak slip or allowing Ebola to balloon into the second biggest outbreak in history — by attacking Fauci and plugging baseless conjecture about COVID’s origins. Unfortunately, for some people, this strategy seems to be convincing.

The post Fauci is an easy scapegoat for pandemic revisionists  appeared first on Salon.com.

Six years ago, Match.com released an ad in which the devil met his true love: 2020. The couple spent their courtship sharing fun Covid-era activities, like stealing toilet paper, enjoying empty cinemas and stadiums, and taking selfies in front of dumpster fires, all to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” In a memorable tagline, Satan said, “I just don’t want this year to end.” Released in December, only weeks after the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, it reflected the national mood perfectly: horror at what we’d all been through, and vast relief that it was almost over.

Sadly, it seems we are destined to live in that damned year until the end of our days. 

The year ended on a high note. Biden was elected president, the new Covid-19 vaccines were about to become available and we felt we could look forward to a day in the not-so-distant future when going to the grocery store didn’t come with a potential death sentence. Many people were back at work in one way or another, and the government had managed to get the American people through the crisis without suffering economic ruin. But it soon became clear Trump was unable to admit he had lost his reelection bid, and by January he and his army of surrogates and influencers had worked his MAGA followers into such a frenzy that they stormed the Capitol to stop certification of the election results. 

At the same time, the MAGA faithful at home, which had, with the president’s help, pushed snake oil cures and conspiracy theories about the virus for months, were unwilling to move on from their various obsessions. They were set to turn the anti-vaccine movement into a juggernaut that would be ready to take on the entire American public health system and challenge medical science in general. The “do-your-own-research” crowd had felt their power, and they liked it. 

Still, most of the country eventually moved on. Things had changed in some ways. Working from home is now a regular feature of the work world, Zoom calls are an everyday thing, and digital learning and telehealth have become mainstream. 

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Imagine my surprise, then, to awaken on Wednesday to a Senate hearing featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci in which he was being asked about hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. I had to check to make sure I wasn’t accidentally watching a documentary about the pandemic. But no: Rand Paul, Kentucky’s GOP senator had decided to scrape off the scab yet again by calling Fauci to face a grilling by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Fauci looked the same. Paul looked the same. The daft conspiracy theories sounded the same. It was as if the last six years never happened. Déjà vu all over again. 

Before leaving office, Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci — and for good reason. The doctor had become the whipping boy of the MAGA right, commonly accused of personally creating Covid-19 (in cahoots with Chinese communists, naturally) and then making a vaccine that they insist killed more people than the virus. It’s all nonsense, of course. There are still debates about the origins of the virus, but the idea that Fauci created or enabled it in some way is ridiculous. The hearing, ostensibly called to get to the bottom of all this, is actually just the latest step in Rand Paul’s petty vendetta against Fauci that began when they sparred in a series of confrontations during the crisis. 

Despite being a doctor, Paul has always had, shall we say, an eccentric view of medical science, and he could never get the better of Fauci in their meetings. But the senator wanted the last word, and he got it. Ignoring Biden’s pardon, Paul threatened Fauci with perjury if he “lied” during this latest hearing, a charge he claimed would not be covered by the pardon. In fact, the whole hearing was obviously a perjury trap. 

Paul had released Fauci’s 1,000-page private pandemic diaries — helpfully provided to him by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — which had been stored on government servers. The senator knew there would likely be inconsistencies between Fauci’s memory and what he wrote at the time. Fauci’s attorney wisely told him to assert his Fifth Amendment rights, which he did. Paul threw that attorney out of the hearing for attempting to explain why. 

The senator’s Republican colleagues piled on in their questioning of Fauci. Ohio’s Bernie Moreno was especially grotesque, bellowing “Who the f**k do you think you were?” at the 85-year-old scientist. Even Trump was less harsh in his commentary about the hearing, merely saying that he stopped listening to Fauci after a while. 

But the hearing wasn’t the only recent time warp. Trump has spent the last six years attempting to rewrite the 2020 election, and apparently it’s not enough that he made one of the greatest political comebacks in history. He needs to erase the fact that he ever lost in the first place, so he has deployed the intelligence community to find proof that he didn’t. and decided to give a primetime presidential address on July 16 to reveal the findings. 

To no one’s surprise, it was a dud. The information he presented was mostly old news, and he failed to provide any proof that domestic or foreign actors had any impact on the election that year — because they didn’t. Even his MAGA media ecosystem was left unimpressed.

But Trump remains undaunted. He’s been willing to completely blow up the legislative session going into November’s midterms unless he gets his way with the SAVE America Act, legislation designed to suppress the vote, which Senate Republicans have so far refused to pass. (It will suppress their own voters too.) 

For Trump and Republicans, the worst year in living memory will never end, and it’s easy to see why. Like the devil in that famous ad, it’s their idea of a good time.

The post Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearing proves we’re still living in 2020 appeared first on Salon.com.