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Denial often protects people from fear, loss of control, and threats to identity.

Populists turn those fears into votes by casting scientists and experts as enemies.

Climate and COVID denial did not erase reality; it shifted the costs onto the vulnerable.

Scientists must speak to people as they are, so knowledge can still be heard and protect lives.

In November 2021, J. D. Vance delivered a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” ending with Richard Nixon’s declaration that “the professors are the enemy.” At the time, Vance was a candidate for the United States Senate; today, he is vice president of the United States. One of the most powerful men in one of the most powerful countries in the world had thus described professors, researchers, and teachers not merely as mistaken, politically biased, socially remote, or occasionally arrogant, but as enemies.

States have enemies in the form of hostile powers, terrorists, and those who seek their destruction. To place professors in this category is therefore not merely to criticize universities. It is to suggest that the pursuit, preservation, and transmission of knowledge have themselves become forms of hostility—and that those engaged in them are not simply citizens with whom one disagrees, but adversaries against whom the exercise of state power may be regarded as justified, perhaps even required.

As a professor, I found this harder to comprehend than ordinary disagreement or criticism of universities, both of which science can readily accommodate. What is new, and much more disturbing, is the transformation of knowledge itself into something sinister, and of those who devote their lives to acquiring it into a hostile social class.

Perhaps the explanation begins not in politics but in psychology. Science denial cannot be reduced to lack of education, stupidity, or ignorance, although it is often enough sustained by all three. Nor is it usually the result of too little information. More often, it also serves as a defense against fear, because a threatening reality does not merely add another fact to the world; it imposes demands upon us.

Climate change asks us to reconsider habits of........

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