CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Anti-Science Campaign Nakedly Exposed

Image by National Cancer Institute.

“Unless we find a way to overcome anti-science, humankind will face its gravest threat yet — the collapse of civilization as we know it… There is a highly organized well-funded campaign of antiscience, and it has now emerged as its own deadly force that not only makes it nearly impossible to combat future pandemics or the climate crisis but also touches on many other aspects of our daily lives.” (Michael E. Mann & Peter J. Hotez, Science Under Siege, Hachette Book Group, NY, 2025)

An Associated Press investigation found that more than 420 “anti-science” bills were introduced in statehouses last year, more are expected in 2026. .The world’s anti-science campaign has never been bolder, intentionally clobbering the credibility of climate change and biomedical science with bold-faced lies, and it is winning.

In the preface to their new book, Science Under Siege, Mann and Hotez explain in some gory detail their experience of 20 years of personal warfare against an invisible enemy that, at times, threatened their lives and intimidated their families, now fully exposed in the limelight of a very special extremely well-researched book that illuminates the five principal sources of antiscience (1) the plutocrats (2) the petrostates (3) the pros (4) the propagandists (5) our press.

It’s a resourceful book filled with factual data, naming names, identifying collaborators, heavily footnoted and written by leading scientists at the top of the profession known for solid scientific analysis. Mann and Hotez are accomplished well-respected in academia. Ironically, they are repeatedly attacked with falsehoods for telling the truth.

Their book is a roadmap that exposes this enemy of the truth: “We provide a road map for dismantling the antiscience machine… This book is a warning. But it is also a call to arms… When we first embarked on our doctoral training decades ago, we never thought we were signing up to be combatants in a war on science and scientists.” Their remarkable professional life story follows in the footsteps of a timeline of the epitome of science’s impact as a foundation of the health of society as the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s marked a golden era of public health in the United States, characterized by massive strides in controlling, preventing, and eliminating infectious diseases through vaccines, antibiotics, and improved sanitation, but sorrowfully, today’s insane rejection of that glorious golden era by anti-science collaborators is now an overwhelming destructive force of ‘the establishment.’ Along the way, “public assault by the GOP has diminished the public trust of science among conservatives.” (pg.6)

The Republican Party plays a feature role in the book by beating the anti-science drum purely for political purposes, e.g., “At the 2021 CPAC in Dallas, party faithful were warned that public health scientists will first vaccinate you and then take away........

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