A famous quote attributed to Winston Churchill says that, “The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists”. Despite the almost certainty that Churchill never said it, it remains a useful quote.
Too often, those decrying some evil are themselves equally guilty of it. As Churchill did say, “Nazism and Communism imagine themselves as exact opposites…They are, in fact, as alike as two peas.”
In a more modern instance, it’s quite common for the chattering classes to decry something they disapprove of as “anti-science”: even while they are behaving as anti-scientifically as could be imagined.
Prof Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine professor of pediatrics and molecular virology, is urging for federal “hate-crime” protections to be expanded to include criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists.
This is, quite simply, one of the most anti-science pronouncements made since Galileo was sentenced to house arrest.
Anyone who demands to forcibly silence critics using the bludgeon of the state is acting utterly contrary to the foundational tenets of science. The Lysenkoists imprisoned their critics. The Nazis banned “Jewish science”. Communist China jails its critics.
In a July 28 paper in PLOS Biology titled “Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States,” Peter Hotez writes that a “band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists.”
Hotez suggests that it is not enough to simply encourage such research; it is also necessary to criminalize attacks against it. This is one of a lot of proposals put out short to support scientists, but it is the most worrying.
Hotez contends that good science necessitates cracking down on the “right,” citing Nazi and fascist movements throughout history[…]
“In parallel, conservative news outlets repeatedly and purposefully promote disinformation designed to portray key American scientists as enemies,” says Hotez, citing the House Republicans’ Select Subcommittee on the Origins of COVID-19 as an example of “antiscience aggression,” – claiming that it was “ignited by gain-of-function genetic engineering research from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
As I wrote in my Insight piece, What Is Science?, thinking scientifically is thinking critically. Thinking scientifically necessarily demands logical reasoning and scepticism. Hotez demonstrates none of them.
Note that Hotez not once attempts to actually refute the claim that GoF research at Wuhan may have been the source of the SARs-CoV-2 virus. All he can do is howl a cacophony of logical fallacies.
He summarizes by identifying three causes of “aggression against science and scientists in America arises from three sources,” naming them as “1) Far-right members of the US Congress, 2) the conservative news outlets and 3) a group of thought leaders who provide intellectual underpinnings to fuel the first two elements.”
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Hotez repeatedly attacks the sources of criticism and attempts to dismiss critics on the basis of who and what they are. This is completely contrary to every tenet of scientific thinking.
Worse, Hotez is promoting exactly the sort of anti-intellectual authoritarianism that characterised the darkest anti-science regimes in history. He is aligning himself with the Inquisition and the Lysenkoists.
Trofim Lysenko and his cronies sent thousands of his critics #8211; mostly scientists – to the gulag. Many more had their careers destroyed. Dozens were executed. The Lysenkoists never defended their crackpot ideas in open debate. Instead, they bullied, shouted down and jailed their opponents. Anyone who criticised Lysenko’s “Marxist biology” was howled down as a “rightist subversive”.
Peter Hotez is proving an able protégé of Lysenko.
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