Must Read: Behind the Republican Attack on Science

Over at big Orange, The Open Science Thread

by DarkSyde has a link at the bottom to a very enlightening story…

Why the Right Wing Attacks Science at Effect Measure lays out the war on science, and it’s been going on for 30 years, and escalated for the last 16…

To get the Big Picture, we have to return to the sixties and the extraordinary forces it unleashed: the civil rights movement and its struggle against institutionalized racism; the anti-war movement, which didn’t disappear with the end of the Vietnam war but transformed into a potent intellectual critique of Great Power economic, cultural and military imperialism (an old fashioned but apt word for what was happening); the woman’s movement, with its probing deconstruction of everyday social relations; the consumer movement, and its demystification of marketing techniques; and the environmental movement, which seemed to burst onto the scene fully formed on Earth Day 1970. Gay rights was still to come, but by the early 70s the platter of status quo changing social forces was already heaped pretty high.

The Right’s answer to this was to set the Conservative Think Tanks on the problem..

In 1992 it wasn’t yet feasible to destroy the government mechanism of environmental protection by executive fiat. Reagan tried it in the 1980s and it produced a serious public backlash. Reagan did a lot of damage but the experienced showed the environmental movement couldn’t be attacked head-on. A new method would have to be found. It was time to turn the Red Scare into the Green Scare.

I’ve used up my open usage quotes, so go to the link for the rest of the story.