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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

Some of this, but I think a lot of it was that everyone thinks of themselves as logical but in fact everyone is influenced by their lizard brain. Many people *hated* how COVID made them change their lives, and it surfaced as lashing out at science and logic.

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

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.

Even this very good article by Rachel Carson cites the 2025 WHO report saying the matter is "inconclusive" and Jesse Bloom who says "it's important to keep investigating this question with an open mind". Both are technically correct, but a reader may be quite misled about the degree of uncertainty.

In the case of the 2025 WHO report, that's of course the fault of the authors themselves, but it nonetheless is also due to the remaining influence of Bloom et al's 2021 Science letter.