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“We are in a Joseph McCarthy moment” is right. One good thing about this is it talks about some goals of the Rand Paul hearing (put Fauci in jail). We should all do more talking about agenda and not get dragged into details.

That said, the video doesn’t even go far enough to talk about the bigger agenda. Why this witch hunt? It’s a political stunt to create enemies, Emanuel Goldstein-like, to deflect from their own failures of vision and gov’t and society. Fauci is the victim of a media/comms plan from MAGA elite.

(See malar0ne.bsky.social on how Scott Atlas talked about the plan to shift blame for COVID.) And that worked b/c biomedical science failed to speak up enough. I heard a longtime scipol person say that @michaelemann.bsky.social had done huge damage to science by speaking out. No. The opposite.

Credit to @noupside.bsky.social and people like Mann for speaking clearly about what is happening. The idea scientists can be silent and this will go away—and the former Cold War/consensus bipartisan support for science will magically reappear—is both wrong, and the reason Fauci needs a sec detail.

Fixing science in the US, and everywhere—because rightwing authoritarian movements and fractionated media (check @peterpomerantsev.bsky.social and DiResta books) are on the rise worldwide—needs us to speak up, not stay silent. Silence is capitulation. Democratic values are scientific values.

Which means the humanities and science are tied together. History, communication, media studies, sociology, legal scholarship, public opinion dynamics: these are essential and if scientists don’t hang together with them we will surely hang alone. /end

Thread on the Goldstein ref

I think the climate science and asbestos/smoking attacks are useful comparisons inasmuch as they reflect similar conspiratorial stuff in a different media environment.

Also, science needs to care about journalism too! The collapse of the US journalism industry (which is related to conspiracies and fractionation but not the only cause) is also a reason we are here.

Precise summary

Well, one thing MAGA did get right is one can't trust the mainstream media like Rolling Stone and Katherine Eban 🤪 To be a bit serious, I think both have done good work, but here they are promoting conspiracy theory.