I know many readers here are similarily exhausted; so this is not to complain but to show that maybe there are small things we can do here and there.

For example, I recently created an interactive Covid-19 origins timeline based on the research in my book with the help of AI tools. It´s not perfect, but it is a lot more accessible than a 500 page book. I prototyped (or vibe-coded) the html for the timeline up in a few hours using Claude code, because I thought this is a useful thing to have and a bounded application of AI I can stand behind. (I also wrote a new AI use policy for my blog here)

Because of this experiment, I got a bit more ambitious to try to create a useful resource from our Science Counterpunch interviews. You can watch the live video explainer on top, and you can find the library here.

What the Science Counterpunch library actually is

I went back through every transcript from all ten episodes and used AI to summarize and create ultimately 305 individual insight cards. Every card is attributed by name, and 169 of them carry a direct, timestamped link back to the exact second in the original video where the guest said it to make sure context can be re-established.

The more interesting part of this library is what it makes visible, which is that there are a lot of issues, but also a lot of proposed solutions. Overall, our guests had proposed up 90+ solutions (of course with various degree of overlaps or anecdotal touch)

I believe that by making the problem and solution space parsable, at a glance, maybe it opens a way to find some nuggets of insights for people who do not have the time to listen to 10+ hours of podcast inverviews and then do the pattern-analysis on top of it themselves.

But check for yourself.

The library has many ways to explore the insights:

The Insight Card Library — search and filter across all ten episodes and according to category (e.g solutions). This is to really explore freely. You can also type in a name, a tactic, a keyword; and every guest who touched upon it.

The Problem → Solution Map — I let AI group every problem-type card into 7 clusters and every solution-type card into 7 clusters, this is not perfect but a useful way to parse the problem and solution space.

The Episode × Category Heatmap — which episodes lean hardest into which kind of content. Episode 6 for example, with Gregg Gonsalves, is almost entirely focused on actism solutions. That is not a coincidence; that is who Gregg is and what fights he has actually been in.

The Recurring Concepts Map — just a different way to show where guests overlapped (e.g many had used RFKjr as a case example of a bad actors with real-world consequences)

It’s a tool. It’s also just fun to poke around in

I don’t want to hide the second half of this.

Yes, the library exists to make tactics, systemic problems, and solutions legible fast for people with little time and much exhaustion.

But it’s also just enjoyable to click through — to follow a thread from a problem cluster to the solutions guests actually proposed for it, to go down a rabbit hole starting from one guest’s name and end up somewhere you didn’t plan on.

I built it to be explored, not learned.

Participatory engagement for people looking for inspiration in the fight against anti-science.

Maybe that is not your cup of tea.

The Counterpunch Insights library

1.49MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Find it here to explore: https://www.lab-leak-fever.com/science-counterpunch-library

Download

Either way, this exists now.

Protagonist Science is a little digital corner that tries to bring science and society closer together. That mission only works if readers can trust what they find here is not only well sourced, reasoned and argued for; but also not build to steal their time, money or emotional engagement.

Consequently, I have seen the rise of generative AI very critically, as do I see the whole campaign to shove AI chatbots down everybodies’ throats so robber billionaires can become feudal godkings while the rest of us their servs.

Unsurprisingly, I have also been a lukewarmer on AI adoption; I see the innovations in machine learning, transformer architectures etc. as a cool and fundamentally normal, but not magical, technology that is powerful when used appropriately and in bounded use cases, and pretty terrible when implemented as a syncophantic user manipulation and lock-in before enshittification tool.

That all being said, either denying this technology exists now or objecting in principle to its use does not seem to be the right way for me, especially when there are many positive visions of AI use, from kami to community.

So inspired by science journalist on her newsletter´s AI policy, I thought about what my principles might look like for AI use.

My rules

1. The blog writing is mine. Maybe I am early because I read a lot, but AI-generated prose, even when trained on style, tone and voice of my own material, tends to fall short, be bland, boring, generic and just not really worth engaging with. I will not try to avoid certain constellations or phrases now associated with AI to signal my humaness, I will just keep writing.

2. My name means my accountability. Every factual claim, citation, and argument published here ultimately comes back to me. If I used an AI tool to assist with research on something, but I can’t verify it, it doesn’t run or will be transparently and explicitly caveated as AI generated content. In general, because AI is not accountable, it should not be used in processes where accountability is required.

3. AI for summaries, aggregation, bridging of bounded content tends to be good and useful. One of my understandings of modern LLMs is that they are superhuman token manipulators; and when the control of the original data is mine, reshuffling these tokens on existing, bounded-content in many ways to sundays is just something I find very useful for me and my work. Be it to summarize interview transcripts, check references, or filter and search content for things like ad verbatim quotes is a real time saver.

4. AI-assisted coding and prototyping. I think coding is the most interesting case of bounded utility where the AI can take the druggery of coding while keeping the creative process and architectural decisions on what to code by the human. Now I am not saying anybody should use AI for really critical tasks where accountability is needed (see rule 1), but for prototyping some personal project ideas that live on the web I have to say it has now grown on me.

How I use AI

• Research and literature triage: summarizing papers or articles, surfacing related work, helping me get through a stack of potential sources faster. I will still read the primary sources myself before referencing them.

• Prototyping: AI may help me brainstorm scenarios or execute certain ideas I have to a point where I feel ready to either discard or take over as human. Just like other humans can help us feel inspired, so can whatever a machine might bring forward. Anything goes. The question is the rigor and process applied afterwards, not how it came about. (this is very much how Feyerabend talks about science under the fancy term epistemological anarchism)

• Vibe Coding: for building new html features or data analysis graphs I found it very useful. AI handles the boring, mechanical parts — boilerplate, syntax, debugging. The creative and architectural decisions — what to build and why — stay human.

• and I quote directly from Elise Cutts:

  The absurdity exception

  If a system or task disrespects my humanity, it does not necessarily deserve the respect of a human response. I may use generative AI tools to do “creative work” (writing) for absurd tasks, especially if the entity demanding and/or evaluating the task is itself an AI (e.g. hiring systems). Absurd tasks are those whose point is not to produce something high-quality, creative, meaningful, or valuable but rather to satisfy some arbitrary requirement or check a box. This also includes highly repetitive, non-creative tasks like re-formatting a list of citations.

  …and here from Audrey Tang:

The crucial line is not between assisted and unassisted production. It is between expression and obligation. A model may help me find words, but it cannot stand behind the promise those words contain. A system may help me prepare for a conversation, but it cannot inherit responsibility for what I decide to say. A tool may render my thoughts more clearly across cultural traditions, yet the intention, the commitment and the accountability must remain human.

How I don’t use AI

• I don’t use AI to draft my prose.

• I don’t let AI hallucinate what it knows.

• I don’t use AI to manufacture sources or expert quotes.

• I don’t allow AI to make up data or research notes.

• I don’t use AI to claim somebody else´s deed.

• I don’t craft AI-generated images to mislead.

Why this matters

A blog built on fighting disinformation has a higher bar than most to not perpetuate harmful information.

This policy is a living document. As my tools and workflows change, I’ll update it to match. — but the underlying commitment won’t: my words, my ideas, and my accountability mean I stand behind what’s published here, even if I don´t get it right the first time.

Cheers,

Philipp

Sometimes constantly being hit by the news cycle creates a bit of a boiling frog syndrome, where terrible injustices, corruption, abuses of power and atrocities blend together into a cacophony of exhaustion that gradually gets accepted as the new normal of our times.

We all know that it is too much, the offenses are too severe, that they can not be allowed to continue, and yet how and when exactly we have to pull the trigger of drastic action, to figuratively jump out before being boiled alive, becomes quite difficult when it turns into collective action problem.

Yet this is the current hostage state of US science.

First movers and individual outspoken actors and resistors at federal institutions and universities have become, and continue to be, more likely targets to face the full wrath of the current anti-science administration compared to their peers who keep their heads down and their mouths shut. The warming waters just seems more tolerable for too many, certainly better than the prospect of consequences followed by jumping out, losing your job, employees, career track or life’s work and facing the threat of retribution without institutional protection.

Well, this week the temperature increase was neither subtle nor gradual.

Let’s revisit.

Trumped up federal crime charges for transporting inactivated virus samples

What do round worm materials, frog embryos, fungi and deactivated virus samples have in common? Apparently, criminal prosecution under the Trump administration.

Yesterday, a flurry of news outlets reported a rather dramatic story about two “foreign scientists” being charged with a “conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox” virus into the US.

What sounds like the start of a terrorist plot is of course much more mundane for some rather minor offenses. It goes back to Jan 2026, when two virologists working for the NIH’s Rocky Mountain laboratory returned from a trip to the Congo where they have been collaboration with local scientists on containing a monkeypox outbreak. It appears from court documents that the researchers had brought back deactivated monkeypox samples (non-infectious, harmless) for either diagnostic or research purposes while declaring to customs and border patrol agents that they were transporting a diagnostic kit; and according to one unreliable whistleblower, the virologists later clarified that it was just “DNA samples”.

Researchers transferring research materials between countries is very common; but often these involve some paperwork and institutional guidelines and specialized carriers. That does not mean that carrying research materials, including certain biological specimen or DNA samples for diagnostics, by commercial aircraft is necessarily illegal or improper, it usually just requires a proper documentation and declaration at customs. The prosecution alleges that the researchers did not have proper documentation and did not declare their materials upfront, which they allege is evidence of a deliberate conspiracy to smuggle those materials in, and lying about it.

The defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and the virologists in question have previously published on using inactivated monkeypox virus in exactly such diagnostic research context.

Now what struck me were not the facts of the case, where the offenses appear to be minor at best, but the tone of the indictment.

And that within ~24 hours of the DOJ press release, roughly 10–12 major outlets picked up the story, including Politico, Newsweek, Associated Press (via Yahoo and U.S. News), FOX (multiple affiliates), CBS local, NewsNation, and widely distributed aggregators like MSN and Yahoo.

“Foreign nationals” “NIH “conspiracy to smuggle” “lying”

Other press releases from the same Eastern District of Michigan U.S. Attorney in recent months read similarly off.

Chinese. Wuhan. Dangerous pathogens. Labs…. Now I don’t know about you, but I have spend five years writing about the lab leak narrative and its weaponization by anti-science manipulators and politicians, and my pattern recognition spider senses were not only tingling, but hitting me with a sledge hammer.

So I started to look deeper….

Let’s start with where I started yesterday night. The unusual language. Maybe these type of DoJ press releases are just how things are in America when it comes to “biological” materials?

So first thing I did is look into the press release history of 10+ other US attorney offices (out of 94 DoJ districts in the US). I focused on districts containing major airports and big research centers, such as Southern and Eastern District of New York, all districts in California, Texas, Florida, Massachussets.

Until 2025, I was not able to find a single press release about biological material smuggling or related items in a collective of over 50.000 press release records for those 10+ districts, including the same Eastern District of Michigan that now so overeagerly has went on a spree against Chinese researchers.

With the sole exception of Massachussets, where in July 2025 a Trump-appointed prosecutor charges a Russian scientist for bringing undeclared frog embryo research materials in, the Eastern District of Michigan US attorney seems to stand out, with a flurry of press releases on foreign aliens from Wuhan allegedly “smuggling” biological material.

As Jon Cohen from Science Magazine notes on this story, this recent charge “comes amid a recent U.S. crackdown on potential violations by researchers of the rules and regulations regarding the import of biological materials”.

Now that attorney, Jerome F. Gorgon, Jr., who was appointed to serve as Interim U.S. Attorney by Pam Bondi, has been at the center of these cases against virologists and Chinese researchers.

But is it really a crack down or biological material violations or something maybe a bit more performative?

Let´s remember the press release. They alleged deliberate lying. That there was a smuggling conspiracy to bring in monkeypox. But the court documents themselves acknowledge that these samples were not monkeypox but inactivated virus or DNA; not-infectious, not harmful. Same is true for the other “biological materials”, i.e round worms and frog embryos.

So when I looked into the previous press releases against Chinese scientists, I found a familiar cast of characters who seemed all to willing to comment as if terrorist plots have been thwarted, such as:

“Allegedly attempting to smuggle biological materials under the guise of ‘research’ is a serious crime that threatens America’s national and agricultural security,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “We will remain vigilant to threats like these from foreign nationals who would take advantage of America’s generosity to advance a malicious agenda.”

“Three Chinese nationals are charged with smuggling dangerous biological materials into the country and made false statements to law enforcement,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. “Thanks to our brave DHS law enforcement and the FBI, they no longer pose a national security threat. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are ensuring foreign criminals cannot abuse our visa programs to harm the American people."

"This case underscores the vital importance of safeguarding the American people and addressing vulnerabilities within foreign student and exchange visitor programs," stated acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons. "Educational institutions must enhance their admissions procedures to prevent exploitation, which can pose risks to national security, as demonstrated in this instance. I commend the ICE HSI agents and officers who work tirelessly to protect our nation and uphold the rule of law every day."

"These charges show the FBI and our partners will aggressively investigate and hold accountable those who violate our laws, and that academic research cannot excuse illegal activity," said FBI Director Kash Patel. "The Chinese nationals charged today allegedly were involved in smuggling biological materials into the U.S. on several occasions. The FBI and our partners are committed to defending the homeland and stopping any illegal smuggling into our country."

Huh, quite the cast of characters for the terrible offense of carrying… round worms (material) for research?

So what is really going on here?

About a year ago, pulled together a team of scholars and academics to write the anti-autocracy handbook for scholars. In it, we describe how autocrats charge inconvenient citizens with often minor infractions to set an example, discourage dissent and create scapegoats.

The FBI famously scrutinized Martin Luther King´s travel receipts, wiretapped his phones, bugged his hotel rooms, and planted informants in hopes of finding ways to delegitimize him. One of our authors, also wrote about how academics in the US are again facing process-as-punishment: “Often it is not the goal or outcome that matters, but the spectacle along the way.”

Now let´s quickly return to the virologists in question; Vincent Munster, head of the virus ecology section at a division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

For years, he has become a target of conspiratorial communities with some far-out conspiracy theorists alleging - in the most convoluted game of incoherent connections and nonsensical speculations - that Vincent Munster is the creator of COVID-19 together with Ralph Baric. Absurd of course, but not unusual as these hate communities constantly churn out new villains to sustain their conspiratorial worldview and community. Point is, Munster has had a target put on his back by these conspiratorial communities for a long time, and since many in the administration share the same tendencies and information environments, I highly doubt that what has happened to Munster is just a coincidence.

So what new directives exactly?

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Russell Voughts new commandment: We want your obedience, not your knowledge

Russell Vought is the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB in short. The OMB’s powerful role in the administration are to manage and supervise the budget of executive agencies and to implement the agenda of the president.

Russell is of course also famously entangled with the Heritage Foundation´s Project 2025, a conservative policy magnum opus full of disdain for liberal democracy, human rights, science, the environment, and anything else that is good in the world in favor of enriching the billionaires who sponsored it and the white supremacists who ideologically shaped it.

Russell has been busy to implement the 2025 agenda and now, a good year and a half in power, and after crafting many devastating assaults on the independence of science and proposing dramatic cuts to scientific agencies (that Congress rejected), he offered his next policy plan to completely eliminate the independence of US science, punish US scientists and control their associations, and basically purge anybody not willing to go along with the fascist MAGA project.

This of course did not go unnoticed, and I will just refer to some excellent coverage from fromer NIH programm officer of 22 years who first explained in detail what this new OMB rule would mean in practice:

Here is another high-profile emergency meeting organized two days ago by and Stand Up for Science discusses the proposal with historian , US Congresswoman Judy Chu, Nobel Laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, and of course :

On the printed side, there have been two very good articles in the magazine science from Derek Lowe and Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp.

Rarely, there has been such uniform disagreement among scientists to a new policy proposal, and so much deserved attention on this topic.

The OMB´s rule to subjugate scientific grants to the whims of political appointees enforcing the presidents agenda comes on the back of NIH and NASA political appointees targeting international collaborations, banning “co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States” These “forbidden foreigners” could even include foreign students working in the U.S. and scientists who left the country after the research.

In short, it is mighty ugly and exactly what Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and other autocratic regimes did to its scientists. Russel Vought and the second Trump administration has one clear message to US scientists:

And now this brings us back to where we started. That they are already willing to make a spectacle out of criminally prosecuting scientists for minor offenses is not an exception or a tough on “biologics materials” policy stance.

It´s a foreboding what is to come if they are not stopped.

Too many academic society and institutional leaders still are just sitting frogs in the warm water, waiting for the temperature to come down again. (h/t )

It won´t by itself. You gotta jump.

Start with defeating the OMB rule here by commenting your opposition today.

I guess that is my message.

PS: For a larger battle-plan, here are some ideas:

You might have read or heard that scientists have come under immense pressure ever since the pandemic, and specifically the second Trump administration. Given the dizzying array of outrageous news, authoritarian actions, war propaganda, brutality and blatant corruption scandals, it is easy to lose sight of the longer-term trends on some generational changes happening around us.

I’ve spent the last few years interviewing scientists and science advocates who have found themselves in an uncomfortable place they never asked to be: At the front row in the fight to resist autocratization. Many other scientists became targets of motivated actors and agendas not by defending their research or their area of expertise, but defending the principle of a shared, objective reality itself.

So I’d like to start with a bit of a data-driven summary of what has happened to US science since January 2025 on two dimensions, vaccines and science funding, using a tracking and database tool created by Prof. . Her Trump Action Tracker is extremely handy to zoom out to the larger picture and find the patterns behind the often chaotic and random-seeming day-to-day evils of the current regime.

Let’s just take a look how a federally-empowered anti-science movement has wreaked havoc in the vaccine space in the last 15 months, shall we?

Attacks on vaccines and immunization

From around 680 tracked action items pertaining to attacks on science and education, around a 115 have been focused on vaccine science, immunization, vaccine regulation or related topics. Here is a cumulative graph with vaccine actions highlighted, and a second visualization with labels showing the most severe actions based on population impact.

If anybody is interested in what the most severe actions are, here they are listed again with some comment about impact and at least one reporting source.

This is of course only one area of anti-science that the Trump administration, Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya, and HHS Secretary RFKjr. and the MAHA movement have worked hard to dismantle and subvert. Here is another:

Attacks on scientific funding

Across scientific agencies such as NASA, NIH, EPA etc and federally funded universities (Harvard, Columbia…), also governmental departments such as the Department of Energy (DoE), ideologically motivated funding cuts and re-allocations are used to dismantle unwelcome science. Where that US Congress-allocated money goes is also not clear, but part of it will likely find it’s way to filling the pockets of regime-aligned beneficiaries; from Trump family and loyalists to big tech and fossil fuel interests.

The destruction of US science by the administration and the anti-science movement have mostly been met by media pundits, business elites and large parts of Trump supporters with apathy, or even tacit support.

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have soured too many of those interest groups and powerful discourse shapers on scientists having any public voice or influence in public discussions. Especially on society-relevant topics such as technology, health, environment, defense and the economy, where scientists might contest political or business narratives with evidence and expert authority, few of those discourse shapers feel the need to speak up in defense of science.

An often quoted idiom of the billionaire-friendly pundit class and rightwing media machinery (and the NYT columnist section too) contests that “scientists themselves are to blame” for the loss of trust; that they either made too many mistakes, are ideologically captured by self-interests, brainwashed by democrats or leftwing institutions, or are part of multiple devious conspiracies, from big pharma to the deep state.

That at least a sizeable minority of ordinary US citizens believe some version of that absurd narrative is remarkable given that polls and surveys show that MOST PEOPLE STILL TRUST SCIENTISTS MORE THAN ANY OTHER GROUP.

I believe it speaks to the asymmetric power of discourse shapers to bring minority opinion to dominate not only public perception, but also political realities. Most US citizens and even Congress do not want NASA defunded, they do not want cancer research defunded, they do not support the dismantling US science, and they sure as hell want access to vaccines for their children.

So how does the anti-science crowd get away with it, in government and in discourse, against such strong public support for science?

These are hard questions that we tried to understand in our conversations at Science Counterpunch. So I wanted to drill down a little bit on some larger patterns between what the scientists, science activists, and science communicators we had on told us and maybe extract some learnings.

Writing often helps me think, and hopefully these lessons I gathered from my interviews can be useful for anybody who wants to understand or get active in the defense and support of science and scientists.

Here is the visual TL;DR summary of what defenders of science need you to know about the modern anti-science movement, it’s tactics, and why we can’t expect scientists to solve the problem without our support.

1) Anti-science is structurally, not epistemically driven

I think the first, and maybe most important key lesson is this: attacks on science or scientists are rarely driven organically; nor are they caused by confusion, error or poor science communication.

They are driven by vested interests and political power and the incentive structures they create through money, ownership, regulation, class and ideological networks, and governmental policies. Oligarchic platforms, vested industry interests, attention dynamics, culture war politics, monetization, grievance mobilization; all these incentives reward distortion of science and punish those who speak truth to power with science and evidence. Two of our guests, the esteemed scientists Michael Mann and Peter Hotez, have written a whole book about this, so I think it’s worth spending a few more words on this.

In the information age, those who get to shape what information people see, hear, consume or are exposed to wield power. Be it platform owners, influencers, politicians, media elites, power brokers or just conspiratorial or activist crowds that disproportionally participate online and get rewarded by algorithms for it.

Since I have written and spoken about how modern anti-science functions multiple times before, I will just leave you with another figure below on the eco-systemic nature of that anti-science media machinery.

Now, all fascist movements and most autocratization processes include attacks and ultimately the dismantling or subversion of science, evidence and any notion of accountability or objective truth. So the Trump administrations actions very much follow this playbook.

“This government has, led by Trump, entirely decimated the scientific ecosystem in the United States.”
— Colette Delawalla, Founder and CEO Stand up for Science

But that authoritarian playbook is not the whole story, because the anti-science ecosystem does not only operate at the level of government, but in public discourse, in online communities, in business, in religion, your doctor’s office and anywhere else where people can be reached.

Sometimes the inner workings of this anti-science machinery are obvious: anti‑vaccine entrepreneurship, “medical freedom” politics, or influencer profiles built on contrarianism. Sometimes it is quieter: the erosion of institutional norms, the lobbying against unwelcome laws and regulations, and the steady casting of expertise as corruption all converge to remove science as a tool for accountability against the currently powerful.

Most perniciously has been when seasoned anti-science grifters collaborate with the fascist movement to get into position of institutional power at scientific agencies, keeping the veneer of a somewhat functional institution but re-shaping it into a tool of propaganda, voter manipulation, and ideology; which is what happened not only with RFKjr and MAHA for HHS and vaccines, but across most federal agencies; from NASA to NIH, from CDC to EPA.

“These groups figured out that if you control the agencies, you control the narrative.”
— Peter Hotez, Baylor College of Medicine

The anti-science ecosystem has not only grown by its alignment to the fascist political MAGA movement, its rightwing media machine, and vested business interests, its now an essential part in furthering their agenda and enshrining their power.

Scientists that for decades enjoyed public trust and bipartisan support are obviously getting steamrolled and few have yet realized what formidable evil empire they are even up against.

“We’re not even in the fight. We’re literally bringing scientific and policy papers to a fucking war.”
— Colette Delawalla, Founder and CEO Stand up for Science

It’s high time for the rebel alliance to come together. If you need any pointers, I recommend checking out Colette Delawalla’s interview at the end of the article.

Let´s hammer the main point home:

2) Harassers target effectiveness, not error

I think another very clear pattern appears when looking at who gets targeted by the anti-science ecosystem and its media machinery.

The scientists most aggressively harassed across fields are rarely the most controversial or somehow sloppy with their data. The opposite: They are often the most effective communicators or have the most relevant expertise to speak publicly with authority on a topic.

“The people who get attacked aren’t the ones quietly doing bad work in a lab. They’re the ones whose voices reach outside the silo.” - Dan Wilson, Debunk the Funk

Harassment, across domains, follows a shared script to coerce outspoken scientists into silence.

1. Question legitimacy – undermine credentials, motives, or integrity of scientists when they speak up about their expertise

2. Isolate the scientist – portray them as partisan, controversial or ideologically suspect and demand their institution and social contacts distance themselves (Mike Mann calls it the Serengeti strategy)

3. Escalate harassment – threats, abuse, institutional complaints, lawsuits to intimidate and create multiple pressures for outspoken scientists

4. Wait for silence – few people can withstand sustained attacks over a long time without support. Most often, pressure campaigns lead to job loss or resignation, public withdrawal, or self‑censorship.

3) Narrative beats evidence (every time)

A recurring theme in online spaces is that storytelling is powerful.

We humans are a story-telling species. Stories help us navigate life by reducing the complexity of the natural and social world and maintaining social bonds or group-level cooperation. Storytelling represents a key element in the creation and propagation of culture, it is how we make sense of non-routine, uncertain, or novel situations.

Our Decoding the Gurus guests Chris Kavanagh and Matt Browne observed that “secular gurus” succeed not by insights but through anti‑institutional narratives. They position themselves as having answers to complex questions of science that the “mainstream” keeps from them. They spend hours building elaborate stories and spinning conspiracy myths.

Another thing that differentiates gurus from ordinary public intellectuals is the scope and width of their stories and supposed knowledge to help us make sense of the world.

“Public intellectuals are very clear about the limits of their expertise. Secular gurus don’t do that. They add strategic disclaimers, but the performance is certainty.” - Matt Brown, Decoding the Gurus podcast

Their stories offer their audience rebellion aesthetics: the thrill of insider knowledge without the cost of actually learning how things work. Even a role in a moral drama: the awakened dissenter, the persecuted truth‑teller, the heroic minority fighting the good fight against mainstream science.

Sensationalist, intriguing, emotional, or outrageous stories can shape public conversations, even when they are baseless, speculative, or plainly false. Stories as sense-making devices are full of peripheral cues such as familiarity, processing fluency, and cohesion which create an “illusory truth effect”

For a very long time, this power of storytelling has been used by leaders, powerholders, and manipulators alike to further their goals. Media manipulators are interested in creating and selling engaging stories for their bottom line, and science is often an enemy to those efforts because of its debunking potential. So discrediting mainstream science and scientists is part of the business strategy of storytellers.

On top of that, science suffers a dramatic disadvantage when it comes to storytelling because it is bound by fact. Evidence is slow. It is also often nuanced, jargoned, and hard to explain to non-experts. It demands caveats.

“I think you are at a bit of an inherent disadvantage when you’re constrained by the truth.” - Matt Brown, Decoding the Gurus podcast

There is a million ways to make a story more compelling by using fictions; there is decidedly less ways when sticking to facts.

4) Scientific norms utterly fail in asymmetric environments

Online ecosystems are mercurial, capitalistic, maybe even somewhat meritocratic, within their own logic. They monetize outrage, reward spectacle, and build identity-based loyalty. Information is a product to sell, not to educate. Those who do it best profit the most. Truth is incidental at best—and often a liability.

Channeling the feelings of audiences is what matters, not having the best or most accurate information. Scientific caveats, articulating nuance, uncertainty and limitations are inherent to scientific process and accurate communication, but they make for rather poor or dry content.

Many of our interviewees began their public engagement careers believing that their deep expertise, paired with good faith engagements, would be rewarded, or at least reciprocated. They rarely were.

“You can leave in the uncertainty, you can explain carefully—but shouting matches outperform patience every time in that environment.” - Prof. David Kipping, Cool Worlds YouTube channel

Traditional scientific discourse and civility norms fail in such an asymmetric media environment.

Science finds itself at systematic disadvantage, while that asymmetry profoundly shapes the nature of what content gets produced, what content gets seen, and what characters rise to the top of the attention economy.

“Being an edgelord works. It gets attention, it gets clicks, it gets invited on platforms.” - Flint Dibble, Archeology with Flint Dibble YouTube channel

“Everything needs to be clickbaited… We just want the clicks. We want the money.” - Kayleigh Düring, History with Kayleigh YouTube Channel

Another problem of asymmetric media environments is that they are profoundly unequal, following a “rich-get-richer” dynamic or power law distribution of attention. That means once a critical mass of attention has been reached, algorithms constantly deliver new, unsuspecting users while platforms reshape social graphs into “interest” communities around shared narratives. And once there is “audience demand” for a particular “interest”, the supply side will follow.

Given the vast amounts of money flowing into cultivating audiences and creators for the anti-science ecosystem over the last years and decades, a critical mass of misinformation merchants has built a now self-sustaining cottage industry of deception that will not go anywhere anytime soon.

“Charlatans have gotten better and better and better at building businesses from online grifting.” - Dave Farina, Professor Dave explains YouTube channel

Into this well-oiled machine of motivation, monetization and manipulation, you throw in scientists with their inconvenient facts and appeals to evidence-based discussion and expect it to go smoothly for them? Good luck.

The only thing less helpful than being left to our own devises in fighting these grifters is mainstream press implanting themselves as supposed neutral mediators of the conflict.

Giving equal airtime to radically unequal claims, adopting the grifter’s framing of the issue, tripping over themselves to sanewash, whitewash or otherwise rationalize the words and actions of grifters to put them in the best light and most cheritable interpretation are deeply harmful acts.

And the press’ reason for it are so petty and self-absorped; it’s to simulate an outdated journalistic ethos of their own “view from nowhere” neutrality, that they take no sides, have no stakes, and no skin in the outcome. All they end up doing is being played for suckers.

“False balance. Performative neutrality, sort of two sides of the same coin. And it has been completely exploited by bad actors.” - Mike Mann, University of Pennsylvania

5) Disinformation sticks because of psychology, not ignorance

One of the most frustrating realizations for scientists and science communicators alike is that misinformation does not evaporate once a claim is labeled false, corrected, or debunked, even if the correction is taken up by audiences. This is not a deficit of intelligence or education. It is a feature of human cognition. Once an idea enters memory, it continues to exert influence even after it has been consciously rejected.

“It’s very difficult to unbelieve things. Once you’ve heard it, it’s in there.” — Prof. Stefan Lewandowsky

People may acknowledge that a claim is false — and yet they still continue to reason as if it were true minutes later.

Repetition compounds the problem: familiar ideas feel more credible, regardless of accuracy. Add emotion, identity, or narrative coherence, and even consciously rejected, but internalized falsehoods gain an undue influence on our minds and decision making.

This has profound consequences in an information environment optimized for repetition, novelty, and emotional reward driving virality.

“I was depressed and I was disabled… all I could do was sit or lay around… and that makes you watch a lot of YouTube” - Kayleigh Düring, History with Kayleigh YouTube Channel

Disinformation is more prevalently believed in spaces where scientists rarely show up or are seen; from entertainment to online communities and social platforms.

Disinformation does not need to be elaborate to be effective; it only needs to be circulating faster to reach people that have not been exposed to alternative explanations and thus internalize it as knowledge on a topic they might never have thought about before.

6) Institutions externalize costs of engagement to individuals

The lack of courage and silence from institutions may be the most damning pattern of all for individual scientists that come into the crosshair of the anti-science movement.

On the one hand, scientists are encouraged to engage publicly by their intuitions. Grant proposals reward “broader impact.” Universities praise public visibility and might even recruit students and faculty based off it. Journals celebrate influential voices speaking up against power. But when backlash arrives, the costs are privatized.

Harassment, burnout, and career risk are treated as personal resilience failures rather than predictable system outputs.

“We had mass movements. Now we tell individuals to be brave—and leave them alone when things go south.” - Gregg Gonsalves

The message this sends is unmistakable: public engagement is encouraged in theory, but unsupported in practice. The system praises courage abstractly, yet engineers conditions where the rational response is silence.

Institutions often justify this abdication by invoking non‑partisanship, academic freedom, or liability concerns. In reality, these explanations collapse under scrutiny. Choosing not to protect scientists facing coordinated harassment is not apolitical; it is a political choice with dire consequences. It cedes ground to actors who understand that asymmetric pressure works — and that institutions will look away.

The result is a tragedy of collective action. Each institution acts as if the problem of scientists under attack is marginal, exceptional, or external. In aggregate, their inaction normalizes intimidation as a cost of doing science in public. What should be treated as an attack on the integrity of knowledge production that required collective action get quietly reframed as a problem or failure of individuals.

What can be done to fight back?

This has been one of the key questions that I have been occupied with for at least the last five years and that I also posed to most, if not all, of my interviewees out there fighting the good fight. So of course I am not gonna leave you without some actionable solutions to our current problems. In fact, that is the whole point of our Science Counterpunch community.

As you can imagine, there were many fascinating answers, first-hand experiences and practical ideas out there. As my first analysis on the solution space, I tried my best to categorize and group them, look for commonalities across and boil them down drastically to what I believe is a set of broadly agreed actions. There is no single solution, but a set of things we all probably should have been doing years ago and need to start doing today.

Below is again the visual TL;DR summary. I will keep writing and talking more about this in the future, but check out all our interviews below and let´s wrap this long article up.

The growing gap between science and society

Over the last few years, we have seen the gap between science and society widen. While most citizens around the world still believe that scientists are trustworthy and work for the public good, a lot of noise and doubt has been introduced into that relationship by a well-funded, manipulative anti-science ecosystem. We can see the cracks in funding, vaccination rates, muted responses and apathy to a fascist movement feeding US science into the woodchipper.

“Doubt is our product”, has the tobacco industry famously coined. With the modern anti-science juggernaut, we are at this point again. And we seem to be heading faster and faster in the wrong direction, both scientists and society can feel it.

Scientists alone can not defeat an anti-science machinery they did not create. What we can do is ask for help. Give guidance. Start acting and hope others will join.

So to me, the real question of this moments seems no longer whether science can explain itself better to society, but whether society is willing to defend the conditions under which evidence-based discourse, and with it science and democracy, can still exist.

The answer is up to all of us.

PS: If you want to hear more from people who fight back against anti-science, all our interview conversations are freely accessible:

Is a cosmic rock truly an alien spaceship that the government does not want you to know about? Misrepresentations of scientific inquiry or hypotheses often aren’t an accident, but a structural by‑product of how curiosity, media incentives, and speculation collide. Space science, especially the search for alien life, sits at the perfect fault line: high uncertainty, high awe, and enormous public attention. The result is a constant churn of overreach, misinterpretation, and claims that outrun the evidence.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by astrophysicist David Kipping—director of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University and creator of the Cool Worlds channel—to examine how serious science pushes back. We unpack why astronomy and astrobiology attract so much distortion, how careful speculation differs from storytelling dressed up as science, and what it means to communicate uncertainty without killing curiosity.

We talk about:

• why space and alien life grab the public imagination—and why that makes audiences vulnerable to grifters

• the difference between compelling speculation and testable scientific hypotheses

• working with institutions like NASA, and where institutional communication succeeds or fails

• the risks and rewards of engaging massive platforms that don’t consistently respect scientific limits

• what scientists, creators, and audiences can do better or differently to stop misrepresentation before it hardens into belief

Being careful and evidence-driven isn’t about shutting down wonder or fun speculations. It’s about protecting them—by keeping evidence in charge.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Anti-science isn’t a bug in the modern information ecosystem—it’s the feature. Today’s secular gurus don’t need robes or rituals; they wield academic credentials, technical jargon, and a galaxy-brained confidence that turns YouTube, Twitter, and podcasts into pulpits. Their gospel? That institutions are corrupt, science is suspect, and only they have the answers.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Chris Kavanagh and Matt Brown, hosts of Decoding the Gurus, for a forensic look at the rise of anti-science influencers and the cult dynamics that keep their audiences loyal. We dissect how “decorative scholarship” and anti-institutional rhetoric undermine trust, why audiences crave affirmation over information, and what happens when universities and media fail to defend the basics.

We talk about:

• the anatomy of a secular guru—and why credentials are both weapon and shield

• how online communities form around grievance, identity, and ritualized in-group policing

• the psychology of audiences: why emotional energy, resentment, and narcissism fuel the ecosystem

• why institutions struggle to respond; and what academic freedom really means in the age of information warfare

• practical strategies for fighting back: critical consumption, evidence, and refusing to feed the fire

This isn’t about dunking for sport. It’s about understanding the playbook—and arming yourself for the next round.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Modern authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with tanks. It announces itself with spreadsheets, budget cuts, accreditation fights, and the quiet capture of institutions most people barely notice—until they’re gone.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Professor , Professor of Operational Research at UCL and creator of the Trump Action Tracker, a data‑driven record of nearly 3,000 actions documenting the attacks on democratic and scientific institutions in the U.S.

Drawing on her public communication work with Independent SAGE, Christina now raises the alarm about US politics with hard-to-refute data; explains why universities, regulators, media, and science itself are always early targets, and how fear and anticipatory compliance do much of the authoritarian work for free.

We talk about:

• her data collection project “Trump action tracker” and the administration’s method behind the madness

• why modern authoritarianism is quiet, bureaucratic, and strategic

• how controlling data and “official numbers” beats outright censorship

• why institutions don’t protect themselves—and often can’t

• how vulnerable UK institutions really are (even the ones you assume are safe)

• and why paying attention, speaking up, and refusing to disengage still matters

This isn’t about doom-scrolling news. It’s about pattern recognition—and a warning from someone who knows how quickly “it can’t happen here” turns into “it already has.”

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

What happens when fringe anti-vaxxers move from fleecing online communities to the highest halls of power?

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Dr. Dan Wilson, molecular biologist and creator of the Debunk the Funk YouTube Channel, to dissect how anti‑vaccine narratives became mainstream—and why so many institutions seem unprepared to stop them.

Dan walks us through his journey from being conspiracy‑curious as a teenager to becoming a meticulous science communicator, explaining why teaching the scientific method matters more than just throwing facts at people. We unpack the rise of COVID contrarians, the business model behind misinformation, and how grifters learned to weaponize frustration, identity, and “medical freedom.”

We also talk about:

• Why journalists keep asking the wrong questions

• How figures like RFK Jr. slip past accountability

• Why being polite to ordinary people is imperative, yet being polite to grifters a recipe for disaster

• What burnout looks like when misinformation keeps winning

• And how ordinary people can still make a difference without losing their sanity

This isn’t about losing faith in humanity. It’s about learning how bad ideas spread—and how to push back with evidence, empathy, and better questions that spark curiosity rather then reactance.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we welcome epidemiologist, MacArthur Fellow, and lifelong AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves to talk about what happens when politics is attacking public health.

Gregg was on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic with ACT UP in the 1990s, helping to force institutions like the NIH and FDA to accelerate research and expand access to lifesaving treatments. Later, he brought that same activist-scientist playbook to South Africa, confronting deadly AIDS denialism at the level of government policy.

What happens today in the US not only echoes but in many cases exceeds the terrors of the past.

We talk about state-sanctioned pseudoscience, the capture of public-health institutions by political actors and charlatans dead-set on burning down the house, and what has already been destroyed for a generation. We also dig into what activists and scientists did in the 90s to change the course of history—and what those lessons mean now, as global health systems face funding cuts, political sabotage, and a new wave of anti-science ideology.

How do you defend public health when the notion of reality itself is under attack?

You speak up. You organize locally. And you fight them for every school board, city council or community leadership seat at the tables where you can make the lives of people around you better.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Ancient aliens. Lost Ice Age civilizations. Atlantis hidden under the pyramids.

Pseudo-archaeology is having a moment—and it’s not just harmless fun.

In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we step into the ring with archaeologist Flint Dibble and science YouTuber Kayleigh Dunning to break down how conspiracy history took over the internet—and what it takes to fight back.

We talk about the rise of viral pseudo-history pushed by figures like Graham Hancock, why “secret knowledge” narratives spread so easily online, and how social media incentives reward myths over evidence.

But this isn’t just about bad history. It’s about anti-intellectualism, harassment campaigns against scholars, and the growing gap between academic knowledge and public discourse.

So how do you push back?

By stepping into the arena. By meeting audiences where they are. And by showing that our human history is far richer than grifter fantasies want to make you believe.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to amplify lies.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky to dissect the machinery of modern disinformation. We explore why falsehoods leave a cognitive footprint — and why even highly educated people can fall for propaganda and reason themselves into nonsense.

We dig into:

• The psychology of “sticky” misinformation

• Why intelligence isn’t immunity

• How social media architecture supercharges conspiracy thinking

• What the EU’s Digital Services Act gets right about platform power

• Why democracy depends on “epistemic integrity”

• And what scholars can do when autocracy pressures academia

Democracy runs on shared facts, so what happens when those facts are systematically undermined?

We take a hard look at how cognition, algorithms, and power collide — and what it will take to defend reality.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Protest isn’t radical. Silence is.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Colette Delawalla, clinical psychology PhD candidate and founder of Stand Up for Science, for a furious, clear-eyed breakdown of how American science is being dismantled in real time—and why scientists can’t afford to stay “above politics” anymore.

From mass purges at federal agencies and frozen clinical trials to banned words lists and regime-sanctioned pseudoscience, Colette lays out how the Trump administration has turned science into a political weapon. This isn’t abstract policy debate: patients lose hope, researchers lose careers, and the public loses protection.

We dig into how a single act of defiance—“fuck it, let’s protest”—sparked the first mass mobilization against Trump 2.0, why appeasement by legacy science institutions is a dead end, and what actually works when democracy and evidence are under coordinated attack. Along the way, we talk whistleblowers, organizing under pressure, why “science is apolitical” is a myth, and why bringing white papers to a political war guarantees defeat.

This episode is about harvesting anger productively, taking up more responsibility, and drawing lines.
If science is a public good, defending it means showing up—and saying no.

No neutrality. No appeasement.
Just resistance, strategy, and a counterpunch.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

This week on Science Counterpunch, we step into the ring with one of the most uncompromising voices in online science communication: Dave Farina, better known as the creator of Professor Dave Explains.

Dave joins Sam Gregson and Philipp Markolin for a no-holds-barred conversation about the modern pseudoscience economy: how misinformation spreads, why it pays so well, and how grifters, influencers, and political actors exploit distrust in science for profit and power. From antivax propaganda and flat-earth cults to billionaire-backed “anti-establishment” narratives, we break down how the science denial ecosystem works—and why it’s more dangerous than ever.

We dig into Dave’s famously combative style of debunking, the ethics and effectiveness of punching back hard, and whether politeness has quietly helped misinformation go mainstream. Along the way, we talk burnout, audience capture, cult dynamics, algorithmic incentives, and why factual discourse so often loses to flashy lies online.

Most importantly, this episode asks a hard question for scientists and communicators alike: if science denial is now institutionalized, what does fighting back actually require—and who needs to get into the trenches?

No false balance. No kid gloves. Just evidence, context, and a right hook straight to pseudoscience.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

What do vaccines and climate science have in common? The same political actors, media ecosystems, and financial interests have worked to discredit both.

In this inaugural episode of Science Counterpunch, Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Michael Mann go head-to-head with the modern anti-science machine—petrostates, plutocrats, propagandists, performative media, wellness grifters, and the platforms amplifying them.

We break down the tactics: gaslighting, false balance, “freedom” rhetoric, debate traps, and the weaponization of uncertainty. More importantly, we ask what it costs when societies can no longer agree on basic facts.

This is frontline testimony from scientists who’ve taken the hits—and refused to stay quiet.

If you care about science, public discourse, or the future of evidence-based policymaking, this is one to listen to.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

For years, science and scientists have come under pressure from anti-science influencers, propagandists, conspiratorial crowds, deep-pocketed industries and politicians in power.

While the visibility and velocity of these attacks have increased general awareness and raised alarm in the wider scientific community, especially since the second Trump administration, many scientists feel trapped between a rock and a hard place. Institutions they thought would have their back either caved or got corrupted, played it safe in silence or tried to appease. Academic societies are slow to wake up and find their spine. And the press was all too often complicit in sanewashing insanity, simulating neutrality while justifying abuses of the aggressors and shifting blame onto scientists.

We have had enough.

When systems fail, when aggressors threaten, when we get suckerpunched by fascist goons and lose the first round, we don’t give up; we get back up and ready for round two.

This fight has just started, and in our corner there is plenty of reason for hope. We got the brains. We got the evidence. And more importantly, we got the extraordinary courage of ordinary people, scientists and citizens alike, to fight back and not relent when the going gets tough.

So join us, when we bring on scientists under pressure, science communicators, science journalists, activists to explain how to fight back for science.

Every episode will cover new case studies, hard-earned experiences and concrete solutions from people in the fight already. We need to listen and learn. And just maybe, their actions and insights will create a roadmap of effective actions for all of us too.

The time of lying flat on the mat is over.

Now we get up and fight for the future of science and democracy.

Check out our inaugural episode:

Get ready.

Note: This article is a first essay out of my larger research focus on building participatory democracy in the digital age: how to counteract the global authoritarian movement. Given recent AI news and a sense of urgency, I wanted to share one idea that maybe is worth a discussion today.

Unease about the AI investment boom is everywhere

The Atlantic’s excellent article by Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens” inspired something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I will get to that in a bit, but let’s recap:

Quoting from the article:

“The AI boom is visible from orbit.” Fields in Indiana now host vast data centers that “demand more power than two Atlantas.” The U.S., they argue, is becoming an “Nvidia-state,” where one chipmaker has become a “precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.”

Despite hype, profits lag: “Nearly 80 percent of companies using AI discovered the technology had no significant impact on their bottom line.” Analysts whisper “bubble.” OpenAI lost $5 billion last year; Microsoft’s AI losses topped $3 billion.

The article likens today’s frenzy to “the canals, railroads, and fiber-optic cables laid during past booms.” Whether AI transforms the world or triggers a crash, the authors warn, “either outcome will bring real, painful disruption for the rest of us.”

It paints a vivid picture of America racing headlong into an AI-driven infrastructure boom that could reshape—or destabilize—the global economy.

In a matter of years, AI infrastructure has come to dominate American growth. Vast energy-hungry data centers rise from farmland; trillions flow into chips and computing power. I think the authors point out, correctly, that the economic return remains uncertain, I recently argued a similar point about AI and productivity loss and why that might be. So rapid economic windfall justifying the investments seems very unlikely. Like many others, the authors point to the dot-com and other infrastructure bubbles; history suggests such frenzies rarely end smoothly. Whether the AI revolution fulfills its promise or collapses under its own weight, they conclude that shock will be profound, and the United States may already be too invested to turn back.

For me, there is no real question whether this is a bubble, of course it is. But everybody seems to think they can ride it long enough to be not harmed when it inevitably bursts.

As The Atlantic article pointed out, the bigger the bubble gets, the more people will get harmed by the ensuing fallout. Yet hunger from the companies for finding ever more convoluted, reckless and possibly illegitimate ways for money to be poured into their ecosystem to stretch the AI bubble just a bit longer is palpable.

And if the dynamics also sound familiar, it’s because not two decades ago, the Great Recession was precipitated by banks packaging risky mortgages into tranches of securities that were falsely marketed as high-quality. By 2008, the house of cards had collapsed. - The Atlantic

Which is why, when the WSJ just a few days ago reported that the OpenAI CFO calls for a federal backstop, more than a few eyebrows were raised by investors. The comment was followed by a quick supposed walkback from the CFO on LinkedIn, but not really since she just rephrased the point more politely about the government having to “play its part”. Privatize the win, socialize the losses I guess.

All while the systemic risk of a major recession increases by the day.

So why are we allowing them to take the gamble?

Know the game before you gamble

Several stories are told of why the current AI race, despite being a bubble, needs to happen as fast and recklessly as it does, no matter the cost, harms or methods deployed. That China will otherwise win the AI race is one such current crowd pleaser, especially out of the CEO of NVIDIA who coincidentally would gain the most by stoking such US anxieties. Or that AI will unlock untold productivity and lead to real value creation in every sector of the economy soon. Well, I am more of the persuasion that AI is a normal technology, useful and transformative in the long run, but not magic. It seemingly follows a normal S-curve of innovation and people overextrapolate from the current slope while ignoring that we are already seeing some signs of a plateau. But whatever your belief in economic gains in the mid to long-term, I would certainly like to retire the bedtime story that today’s AI boom is a moonshot for machine sentience, and not only because these graphs look immensely silly:

The current AI paradigms will inspire innovators to find applications that actually add value to various industries; but they can not usher in AGI, singularity or extinction. And yet, a combination of these stories and their penetration of the public infosphere, especially the part about imminent or future superintelligence, ushering in various visions of utopia or dystopia, seems to inspire investor FOMO and public imagination.

So let me challenge that frenzy with a different story, one I believe to be more grounded in history and reality, and in many ways more urgent:

It’s the robber barons, rails, rents and defaults of the next twenty years I worry about, not skynet, the singularity or misaligned paperclip optimizers.

Infrastructure ownership: it’s the rails, not the robots

Infrastructure capture refers to the consolidation of essential systems, such as transport, energy, communications, or now AI tech stacks, under the control of a small number of private actors. Historically, this pattern has produced enduring power asymmetries. When a resource becomes indispensable for competition in the market and cannot be reasonably duplicated, its owner wields structural power. When public infrastructure gets privatized or commodified into a corporate chokepoint, those who own it do not merely extract rent; they set the terms of participation in economic and civic life.

A classic example is the Gilded Age railroad monopolies in the United States. By the late 19th century, a handful of companies controlled the rail network, enabling discriminatory pricing and political leverage while producing the largest wealth inequality between a small elite and masses in poverty.

We have seen the same more recently with the big social media platforms, that for too long were treated as consumer products, when in reality they aimed to become the roads and bridges of digital life for most of us while extracting a heavy rent on our attention. That rent did not only make them filthy rich but also extremely powerful and politically influential, enshrining continued exploitation of their users data as their business model.

AI infrastructure magnifies these stakes, as AI tech stacks are becoming the interface to information creation, dissemination and consumption. If a few companies own the chips, data centers, cloud compute, foundational models, model weights, and distribution channels, they effectively control any future useful AI application build on top of it; and with it, the epistemic and economic arteries of the 21st century.

The gamble to become the next Vanderbilt, Rockefeller or Carnegie’s of the info age are long underway. Current tech giants have already captured chips and cloud computing, that is why Nvidia’s data‑center revenue hit $18.4 billion in a single quarter—up 409% YoY as AI hyperscalers started hoarding H100 chips like potable water before a drought. Amazon plowed $8 billion into Anthropic so Claude will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud and training partner, and will utilize Amazon’s custom AI chips. OpenAI will purchase an additional $250 billion of Microsoft Azure cloud compute and locked its model distribution to Azure’s cloud for the next decade.

Such infrastructure costs billions and billions of dollars to provision and maintain, and it’s highly depreciable. In the case of the hyperscalers, the staggering cost is cross-subsidized by other businesses–themselves also massive platforms with significant lock-in […]

In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players.

- Meredith Whittaker on Bluesky

This brings us to the next point:

Strong-arming society into technological lock‑in

Infrastructure capture is not just about finding one bottleneck to own, because bottlenecks can be remedied with just building more capacity over time through market competition or government investment. Real infrastructure capture today is much more about owning the full value-chain, tech stack or ecosystem. That is why the current AI players aim to cement vertical control—chips → cloud → model → API—where each layer enforces the others and makes competition almost impossible. The current AI web of partnerships and strategic investments have only one goal: to entrench big tech incumbents across multiple layers of the value chain.

Good luck trying to spin up an alternative service provider when technical incompatibilities, contractual exclusivity and prohibitively expensive user switching cost sabotage any type of fair competition.

Historical examples include AT&T’s telephone monopoly and Microsoft’s bundling of Windows and Internet Explorer in the 1990s, both of which stifled competition until antitrust interventions, and they seem really tame compared to the AI tech stack capture we observe today by what is basically an industry cartel.

One idea we have to get rid ourselves of is the thought that technological lock-in just happens as a feature of innovation or first-mover advantage by offering new technological capabilities. No, these are deliberate business decisions as rapid adoption is the biggest challenge these companies face, they need to race to entrench themselves before the dust settles.

We can feel their urgency by opening any app these days. They simply put their AI anywhere so people can not escape it. Again, this is not coincidence:

Here is an article by Brian Merchant puts it succinctly: How big tech is force-feeding us AI.

By inserting AI features onto the top of messaging apps and social media, where it’s all but unignorable, by deploying pop-ups and unsubtle design tricks to direct users to AI on the interface, or by pushing prompts to use AI outright, AI is being imposed on billions of users, rather than eagerly adopted.

When your AI business model is to extract rent and exert power through infrastructure and technological lock-in, you better find a million ways to force people to adopt your AI stuff, no matter how crappy, immature or outright unsafe, by any and all means necessary, even leveraging the Trump administration to pressure EU regulation.

Technological lock-in is key because it ensures dominance of tech-turned-AI giants for generations to come. And we know that dominant firms face little pressure to improve quality, consumer protection, or maintain reasonable prices. Instead, once we are locked in, the real squeeze can start.

Preparing for the big squeeze with data colonialism

AI models are built on collective data: the internet’s archives, social media posts, public domain works, academic research, and user interactions. Yet, as these commons are appropriated into proprietary model weights, they cease to be shared public knowledge and become enclosed corporate property.

The AI hunger for data is palpable, not least shown by a steady drip of licensing deals between content publishers and AI hyperscalers.

With a lot of money going around, cash‑starved newsrooms are happily negotiating with AI firms whose models already cannibalize their traffic but now promise them a share of the AI boom and newfound social relevance.

Take a look at The Associated Press:

The news organization has spent the last nine to 12 months making its tens of millions of content assets across text, video, photos and audio formats, machine-readable for LLMs to assimilate easily. […]

“The best AI has the best inputs and generates the best outputs. This is the inverse of garbage in, garbage out,” said Roberts at the summit. “This means that in the future, we need more good quality, high quality content, not less. We’re going to transform the entire multi-trillion-dollar global economy based on AI, and AI fundamentally needs great information to be great”

- Jessica Davis, Digiday

Then there’s Reddit, which disclosed AI data‑licensing contracts with Google and OpenAI, selling their user content for training in exchange for boosts in AI search, immediately tripling their user base thanks to Google AI search.

Sounds like a win-win, right? Let me come to that in a second.

Before, we need to also acknowledge that AI hyperscalers are rarely so kind to ask for information, rather than pirating it by scraping the internet or worse. All AI companies are currently in legal fights over their blatant copyright infringement of information they had no legal way of obtaining, such as books or art. Anthropic recently settled one case for $1.5 billion for pirating half a million books. Peanuts for AI hyperscalers drunk on investor money and the prospect of robbing humanity blind in the future.

But this will make AI just more useful to users, so why worry about how companies get there?

This dynamic mirrors what Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias coined data colonialism: the systematic appropriation of human life through data extraction, justified by narratives of progress and innovation. There was also a time when big tech platforms, from google search to social media platforms, felt genuinely useful and empowering to users. How did that turn out?

The Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the lifecycle of digital platforms that initially serve users, then prioritize business customers, and finally exploit both for maximum profit.

Remember social media platforms that once felt like open, empowering infrastructure? It is no coincidence they quickly devolved into an extractive apparatus for mass exploitation, with all the negative social and political consequences for society we have to grapple with today.

The AI data colonialism currently happening is even more worrisome. The common goods of our digital lives—language, images, art, stories, code—are either mined, bought or simply stolen to produce systems that we then must rent access to through corporate APIs and subscriptions. Every prompt becomes a micro-transaction in a planetary rent economy, and everybody will pay for what was once a public good.

And the social and political consequences will be almost unfathomable.

Something new: owning the interface to reality

Historically, media theorists have warned that the medium shapes the message. Today, it is more like: Control the interface, control the story.

As AI systems are installed as the default lens on the web, they act as new gatekeepers that will arbitrate which facts surface and which fall through the cracks. How thoroughly vulnerable this approach is to the whims of billionaire oligarchs that own the AI systems will surprise exactly nobody who just paid a glimpsing look at Elon Musk’s Grokipedia.

“Shortly after launch, several sources described articles as promoting right-wing perspectives, conspiracy theories, and Elon Musk’s personal views. Other criticism of Grokipedia focused on its accuracy and biases due to AI hallucinations and potential algorithmic bias.”

-Wikipedia (which is actually a community-based model that has proven invaluable to the world)

This is a subtler, more pervasive form of any previous censorship or propaganda system because it operates under the guise of assistance and personalization while selling a very specific and narrow ideological worldview.

The more these captured AI models mediate our access to information, summarizing search results, generating news reports, drafting our communications, the less we experience the raw plurality of perspectives that once defined the open web.

Gatekeepers, censorship and propaganda are of course only the surface of how bad things can get.

Because AI is currently also deployed to create an unmeasurable amount of slop, deep fakes, fan fictions and disinformation that fundamentally will pollute and destroy the information ecosystem as we know it and make it basically unusable for human agents. Leading the pack is of course X.

“We’re trending quickly toward an internet that could be 99.9% AI-generated content, where agents and bots outnumber humans not just in traffic but in creative output. AI agents chat with each other on forums, generate news articles, create thought leadership, engage on social media, leave product reviews, spark controversy, and post memes. Each bot believes it’s talking to a human. Each human statistically is engaging with a bot. Every interaction seems plausible, even engaging. But it’s all synthetic.”

- Benjamin Wald, Galaxy

When the signal to noise ratio of any true information is one in a million within an ocean of related, personalized and microtargeted lies that are optimized to be emotionally compelling, what confidence can we ever have in any information we consume?

Our current chaotic and broken information ecosystems already breed epistemic nihilism, where citizens believe that nothing is ever really true except for what feels right and convenient in the moment.

It is no surprise so many people turn to AI and treat them as answering machines, oracles or all-knowing gods over fact-checking and verifying sources themselves. That cognitive dependency on AI models and agents as navigation tools will only get more profound as time progresses.

Do I really have to point out the power differential when few entities will own and control the AI gatekeepers that generate the bulk of information flows at a time when billions depend on AI for cognitive navigation? Market monopoly would instill a much more powerful epistemic monopoly: control over the conditions of knowing.

Linguist have already noticed that AI “externalized thinking so completely that it makes us all equal” in our use of language. It decreases democratic plurality in the worst way possible; by boiling our human diversity of thought and expression down into a homogeneous language slop.

Once users internalize the AI model’s outputs as truth, it will not only homogenize how we speak but how we reason and see the world. I for one would put that power under as much democratic accountability as possible.

Or much worse… but I do not want to give them any more ideas.

So let’s conclude our current state of affairs:

Welcome to the robber‑mogul playbook

All this leads me to an unpleasant but not unexpected conclusion:

Today’s AI arms race is best understood as a calculated corporate power grap: spend unprecedented sums on compute, secure strategic infrastructure along a vertical tech stack, use your investor billions to manipulate, muscle or coerce a critical mass of users and industry into rapid adoption of your stack despite productivity and expertise losses, security risks and environmental destruction, and let the narrative fog of “AGI” anxieties, geopolitics and empty promises cover up the construction of your death star rentier empire.

Unfortunately, the AI infrastructure boom for these tech moguls isn’t about reaching AGI; winning against China, or unlocking productivity utopia and abundance for humanity. As if any of these narcissistic wannabe sun-king egos would ever spare ambition for anybody but themselves. They play into these narratives with their appearances, press releases and pocketbooks to keep the media and the population occupied to look somewhere else.

But best I can tell, the current evidence suggests that the AI race is mostly about an older, more mundane, imperialistic impulse from centuries past that vast wealth inequality has always engendered: A lust for power. Dominance over the means of human affairs, from collaboration to production, enshrining their position over society for generations to come.

If the tech moguls win their gambit, if they succeed at infrastructure capture, technological lock-in and public dispossession of our shared information ecosystem, we will have ceded more than we have bargained for. Once control over knowledge creation, distribution and consumption (and with it increasingly cognitive agency) is lost for most of us, what awaits is a new dark age of monarchs, myths, manipulation and magical thinking.

A handful will own, a tiny minority will benefit, and the rest of us will fall into exploitation, exclusion or serfdom.

How to stop feudal entrenchment

What would a non‑feudal alternative require?

It is a question that many people are currently working on in the EU and elsewhere. One of them is Robin Berjon, a seasoned technologist and governance expert whose career spans web standards, open protocols, data governance in media, and next-generation infrastructure like IPFS. He works on figuring out how digital systems can be governed in the public interest. He was also very kind and charitable to sit down for a chat with me and outline solutions.

“We really have to break this myth that monopolies were made by innovation, and that they could be broken by innovation.”

- Robin Berjon

He emphasized that the first imperative is to treat digital and AI infrastructure as public-interest infrastructure rather than private consumer products. That means regulation, not innovation, is needed. Historical lessons from railroads and telecom monopolies show that when essential systems are privately captured, democratic oversight collapses. As a strong proponent of digital sovereignty, Robin was very clear about the stakes:

“We have to treat this like a war effort... what you’re fighting for is the right to set your own rules in your own country.”

- Robin Berjon

While my investigation into this topic is still very much ongoing, I already learned from him and others that there are good reasons for hope.

For example, there are already some practical solutions, often with proven efficacy at smaller scales or throughout history, already on offer.

So here is what we (and our representatives) should work on:

• Establish pre-emptive regulatory guardrails today like the EU AI Act’s transparency and systemic-risk obligations, combined with antitrust enforcement to curb exclusive cloud-model tie-ups and break vertical control by tech cartels.

• Enshrine capabilities-centric infrastructure neutrality for things like identity verification, safety or content moderation, ensuring plural applications can compete with each other without having to recreate their own capabilities to fend off bots, spam, scams or cyber attacks that any digital endeavor suffers from

• Demand open protocols, federated architectures and interoperability standards (similar to ActivityPub [Bluesky] or Beckn) to reduce dependency on single platforms, prevent lock-in and empower citizens by transferring data ownership back to users.

• Governmental and public adoption incentives of pro-democracy communication infrastructures. Habermasian democracy depends on institutionalizing norms of discourse. Adoption incentives ensure these norms are embedded in digital spaces rather than leaving them to market forces.

• Foster institutional density: AI should be regulated by a dense web of local institutions and governance models that reflect the diversity of communities and use cases. Start by building governance frameworks locally, experiment and pressure test, whatever works can then be shared or scaled horizontally to other domains.

“If you want democracy, it has to look like a hairball. Democracy is messy, but that’s what makes it resilient.”

- Robin Berjon

• Allow for epistemic pluralism by encouraging many models with diverse priors; resist interface monopolies. Information has a powerful impact on our identity and worldview. Grant individuals the right to control the mechanisms and interfaces that filter their perception

In short, we have to understand and reclaim digital infrastructure as a public good for all of society.

That is my key message for you today; and wildly at odds with current AI developments, media narratives and public attention.

Let’s change that, together.

A quick update on a COVID-19 origins-related discovery making headlines this week — and often for the wrong reasons.

The Telegraph is reporting the finding of a “new COVID virus” in Brazil. That headline is inaccurate: COVID-19 is a disease caused only by SARS-CoV-2. The new virus, BRZ batCoV, is something different — and its discovery actually reinforces what scientists already know about: That nature, not engineers, created the Furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2.

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Here is the quick rundown of the discovery:

An international team of scientists has discovered a new coronavirus, BRZ batCoV, in moustached bats from Brazil that carries a furin cleavage site — a key genetic feature also found in SARS-CoV-2. While the Brazilian bat virus is quite divergent from an overall sequence perspective, forming probably its own subgenus next to the Sarbeco- and Merbecoviruses, its amino acid sequence and position at the critical S1/S2 junction, forms a functional cleavage site remarkably reminiscent to the one observed in SARS-CoV-2.

Of note, the spike protein of this novel bat coronavirus possesses a functional furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction with a unique amino acid sequence motif (RDAR) that differs from that found in SARS-CoV-2 (RRAR) by only one amino acid. - Takada K. et al., bioRxiv, 2025

This finding is significant, but not surprising.

As I wrote previously, these cleavage sites are not unique by any means; in fact, they independently develop all the time in the wider coronavirus family. The wider CoV family tree is sprinkled with FCS sites at the S1/S2 position.

This is not surprising either, because FCS are very short sequences (4 amino acids) and these polybasic cleavage motifs will happen over and over just by chance through recombinations, insertions, or mutations. Most FCS motifs are likely acquired de novo and just don’t stick around if selection pressures do not favor them.

Furthermore, there is good evidence that the S1/S2 boundary region of the genome is a highly variable region in all CoVs and more permissive to genetic alterations than the wider genome through point mutations, insertion, and recombination mechanisms.

The authors find this as well by investigating the protein structure in the S1/S2 region of the BRZ batCoV

"…our results suggest that FCS acquisition is impacted by protein-level constraints, with the S1/S2 junction representing a structurally permissive “hotspot” for stable incorporation of cleavage motifs. - Takada K. et al., bioRxiv, 2025

Again, this just adds to the picture we already had. To support this notion of a ‘higher dynamic’ at the S1/S2 location, another genomic study of SARSr-CoVs in European bats found some indications that FCS at this location might pop in and out of existence in Sarbecoviruses at very low frequencies in a population.

Overall, this discovery adds to our already exisiting evidence basis that nature is perfectly capable of creating a furin cleavage site, no engineer needed.

And if you need any more convincing that the FCS we observe in SARS-CoV-2 is natural and was not engineered, I’ve written a very long article about it, but just look at that hot mess below:

Alright, so science does what science does, continuously adding new nuggets of evidence to an already existing body of knowledge.

The day closes with another L for the lab leakers, as is typical when it comes to scientific support for their fantasy.

Anyways, what else is new?

Rand Paul keeps digging a rabbit hole to hide in:

Sometimes, it is hard to convey how ignorant, dishonest and malicious political actors have been on this topic.

Rand Paul treats virology papers the way flat-earthers treat NASA photos: highlights the wrong part, zooms in 400%, and calls it a smoking gun.

That will not change anytime soon, but for anybody who wants to understand why this fabricated origin controversy has reached the highest halls of power, you know I got you covered:

Alright, that is it for my origins news dispatch.

Stay safe, stay smart, stay connected.

Manufactured controversies for the classroom?

A recent opinion article in statnews by Michaela Kerrissey and Richard J. Tofel has caught my eye on Bluesky.

In it, the authors argued that the origin dispute should serve as a case study in how public-health agencies, science communicators, and media have supposedly struggled under conditions of ambiguity; how they treated and still treat the origin as a taboo topic, and that:

Initial concerns about the possibility of lab involvement gave way to the forging of an apparent early scientific consensus on zoonotic spread. Countering that consensus became very costly; at least one scientist who did so received enough threats to consider changing her name.

This consensus, however, has now at least partially unraveled in the face of multiple investigations.

If you are not so familiar with what they are talking about; these are basically regurgitating three totemic falsehoods highlighting how eagerly they gulped down the lab leak koolaid.

• nobody “forged” an early consensus; unless the authors believe in Anthony Fauci teleconference / proximal origins conspiracy myths

• The authors reference Alina Chan, who was rewarded immediately, never changed her name, never faced any real cost but rather became a media darling by playing the contrarian martyrer. In contrast, virologists that actually worked on the origin question faced incredibly dire costs, from defunding to death threats, from smear campaigns to security incidents at their homes

• The scientific consensus has solidified over the years, and the investigations the authors link to are unscientific political fictions from GOP congressional operatives

Funnily, the authors claimed that they hold no position on the origin questions but somehow align 100% with lab leak lore.

Within science, the consensus remains that zoonotic spillover is overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. The many mutually-contradictory lab leak speculations lack comparable empirical grounding and are often contradicted by hard evidence.

Anyways, that does not stop the authors from explaining their alternative history of events as a supposed failure of public health scientists to grapple with uncertainty.

The lessons here involve both management and communications […]

Beyond this, we think students (and maybe all of us) benefit from exposure to the arguments of those who believe passionately that they know something, even as passionate advocates reach very different, often irreconcilable conclusions — and even if they are partisan.

Apparently, not the strength of evidence, but the strength of belief behind a position should guide our serious considerations and public health communication.

With this simple appeal to “teach the controversy”, the authors fall back on a tried-and-tested tactic from the past. “Teaching the controversy” was a manipulation campaign by creationists from the conservative Discovery institute to subvert evolutionary theory in schools. It manufactured a controversy surrounding evolutionary theory and claimed that fairness requires educating students with a “critical analysis of evolution”, basically that creationism should be taught side-by-side.

Maybe the authors should also have learned from the past they are trying to recreate. One should not respond to manufactured controversies by taking them serious, but contextualizing and questioning them:

The scientific community and science education organizations have replied that there is no scientific controversy regarding the validity of the theory of evolution and that the controversy exists solely in religion and politics.

-American Association for the Advancement of Science. February 16, 2006

I would then still argue that a more robust approach would be to teach why scientific controversies emerge — how media incentives, partisanship, and online ecosystems amplify extremists views — rather than treating both hypotheses as symmetrical. This preserves the authors’ stated goal (teaching epistemic humility) without furthering unsupported narratives.

Blaming the scapegoats

Unfortunately, when continuing to read their opinion piece, the intentions and worldview of the authors become hard to explain cheritably.

We need to come to grips with the root causes of this loss and avoid the easy out of apportioning responsibility to bad actors only. Loss of trust also comes to those that are well intentioned but do not foresee — and do not return to address — the eventual consequences of their early actions, from either a management or communications perspective.

What the authors really do here is to perpetuate not only a manufactured controversy, but something more sinister; they validate the anti-science narrative that the scientists who have been turned to scapegoats by politics and bad actors are to blame for their own circumstances:

I have lost count on how many supposedly “polite society” pundits and outlets have moved in the last years towards blaming scientists for the loss of trust in science, if not for the hardships and trauma of the pandemic itself.

And while the pandemic origin controversy often seems far behind, those who profited the most from it are still working every day to entrench their positions and excert influence over public understanding. All while ordinary science and scientists lose their independence, funding, freedom of inquiry and societal trust and goodwill.

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So what can we do about it?

This has been a question I find myself increasingly occupied with. The participatory nature of online discourse makes it clear that influence flows through networks, that communities often decide what is heard, seen, believed. Silence is surrender, and many scientists are waking up to this reality:

To defend themselves, they [scientists] had no choice but to recognize the political battlefield they were placed on.

And you are right—scientists are now more outspoken. They’ve realized that silence isn’t neutrality; it’s surrender. If they don’t defend evidence-based inquiry, no one else will. Scientists are a minority in every country. Journalists are weakened by collapsing media ecosystems. If both remain silent, truth itself is left undefended.

Of course, scientists must also reflect on their role. For too long, many lived in ivory towers, buffered by public trust and generous funding. The pandemic fractured that trust. Politicians, charlatans, and business interests exploited the gap between science and society, deepening public mistrust. Bridging that gap now requires effort on both sides: scientists must engage more directly with the public, and citizens must reclaim science as a defense against manipulation. - Philipp Markolin, www.wsws.org

So while I spend most of my time these days researching and interviewing experts from many different fields to map out a solution roadmap, I will still try to be present and participate in correcting pandemic origin discourse.

Because althought it is exhausting, it continues to be important.

Today more than ever, I believe we need to have an honest account of what happened in this origin controversy, not regurgitate retconned bullshit, to adequately address what happened to us as a society.

If you are new, unfamiliar or have forgotten a lot about the details surrounding the lab leak narratives, you are not alone. Matt and Chris from the Decoding the Gurus pod created a fantastic primer on the topic while talking about my book:

If you have any questions, feel free to write in the comments or reach out; and I will try to answer them best I can.

Stay safe, stay smart, stay connected!

“Petrostates, polluters, politicians”, or “plutocrats, pros, propagandists” and sometimes also “the press”; there is no lack of aliterations when it comes to Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez new book “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World”.

The dynamic duo of academic heavy hitters are no strangers to sparring with many of the forces of anti-science aggression they outline in their book.

Michael Mann, a destinguished climate scientist most famous for introducing the now iconic Hockey-stick graph into public climate awareness learned first what it meant to become a target in the information age. Ever since hackers stole and misrepresented scientists’ — including Mann´s — emails to cast doubt on climate research right before the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen to sabotage international collaboration, Michael Mann has found himself at the center of the public storm over truth in science. Though multiple independent investigations cleared him and his colleagues of any wrongdoing, the “Climategate” smear campaign cast him as an early villain in what we know understand to be the desired manipulative mirrorworld created by coordinated disinformation networks that Science Under Siege describes. Rather than retreating into the safety of academia, Mann turned outward, becoming one of the most visible defenders of climate science and of scientists’ right to speak without fear.

Peter Hotez, a renowned vaccine scientists, has fought a parallel battle on another front: public health. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccine scientist and pediatrician found himself vilified by anti-vaccine activists — most notably, now HHS secretary RFK Jr cast him as the “OG villain” for writing his deeply personal book about how vaccines did not cause the autism of his daughter, but that autism is a complex genetic disease.

Like Mann, Hotez experienced firsthand the personal cost of promoting evidence-based medicine and confronting misinformation — harassment, threats, and the relentless distortion of his work, which just escalated beyond recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Hotez, too, refused to withdraw. His advocacy for vaccines and global health equity, and his insistence that science must serve humanity rather than ideology, echo throughout this book.

Despite the depths of consideration for the human condition - to preserve human health and a livable planet - and appeals to the better angles of humanity shining throughout the book, the most profound impression lingering is the uncharacteristically sharp and plain-speaking tone and tenor the two bring into its pages.

With scathing commentary and righteous fury, the authors rejected to beat around the bush or the all-too-common academic retreat to euphemisms, rather opting for refreshing — even scorched-earth — clarity of where they stand and who their opponents are. One can not help escape the conclusion that the book is drawing a line in the sand with every chapter; a rebuke to the silent and accomodating institutions that rather surrender academic independence than put up a fight.

There is no appeasement when the fight is existential, the authors remind us; often with some heavy leaning into fictional metaphors, such as The Lord of the Rings:

“The battle for Middle Earth wasn´t won by appeasing the dark lord and his forces. It was won by defeating them”

From fossil fuel magnates and billionaire tech pros to the US congress and a captured SCOTUS, or autocratic petrostates and their agents, to home-grown propagandists and media makers, the authors do not shy away from implicating key players and their malevolent activities that pose a threat to our health, our planet, and more and more, our democracy and freedom.

What malevolant activities? The anti-science ecosystem has long grown beyond shadowy think tanks and closed-door fundraisers to lobby politicians; state-actor sabotage, plutocrat campaigns and dark-money sponsorship has since extended to prop up the “pros” and “propagandists” on social media (or “anti-social media and the bots of war”, one subtitle reads); empowering and amplifying their use of emotional myths and conspiracy theories to dominate online discourse, sway bystanders, and with it indirectly how the “press” covers these events.

“For propagandists, a key feature of the antiscience playbook is its reliance on conspiracy theories and conspiracy-filled rhetoric”

Hotez and Mann do a fantastic job in exposing pay-for-play connections, dirty relationships and how they led to inauthentic outcomes in supposedly democratic real-world events. Much of the book is concerned with the important task of correcting the record on some of the misleading highlights of the last years; which for many people not in the weeds of it, might be as surprising as devastating to learn. From COVID-19 lab leak conspiracies to climate doomism fostered by the mainstream press, from New York Times to Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News and most mainstream outlets inbetween, the seasoned authors hold a special grudge to previous bastions of evidence-based reporting and good-willed truth-seeking institutions that seem to be no more, or at least, strongly diminished when it comes to uphold science. Worse, some like the New York Times actively have become powerful allies of aggressors, justifying the rightwing assault on science and scientists:

With both COVID and climate, the mainstream media have helped keep alive a pernicious but misguided narrative that - to the extent there is distrust of the science by some members of the public - it is the scientists´ fault.

The book describes the “collapse” of the fourth estate and the rise of “client journalism” that has been felt society-wide, and unfortunately, scientists have lost a critical ally in the press when expertise gets discarded or subverted in favor of media content serving vested interests. Even worse, our recent shift into a new dark age of myth, manipulation and magical thinking has made scientists canaries in the coalmine of democracy, and when reading this book, one is left with the sinking feeling that the carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber.

“Our list of allies is growing thin”

The authors report, another reference to The Lord of the Rings. And yet, rather than concede, the authors end the book with broad strokes outlining how the war can still be won, offering “battle plan” and urgency for all of us who want to defend science, democracy and an evidence-based worldview.

The “antiscience superstorm packs a one-two-three punch, and each of the threats must be addressed in concert with the other”, they caution, but for all of them, they advise a 3-pronged strategy for scientists. Communicating constructively because the “best defense is indeed a good offense”; proactively addressing the “triple threat” of invisible scientists, missing science journalism and performative press neutrality head-on. Protecting scientists is another key ingredient, institutionally and legally, that become targets of anti-science assault. And lastly, destroying the disinformation machine; which of course is a challenge that extends far beyond science. On that part, “punishing the pros, propagandists and the press”, “pressuring the plutocrats” and “mending the media”, with the force of the law, new regulations, and ultimately, our pocketbooks and democratic organizing might not surprise the avid reader and democratic citizen who likely has asked themselves the same question at least since the 2024 US election.

“We have to be the change we want to see in the world“

the authors credibly advise, given their own personal trajectories and accomplishments, before ending with another The Lord of the Rings rallying cry that it is worth fighting for what is good in the world, for us, our children and future generations.

Even in dark times, my suspicion is that the furious and clear-eyed moral argument advanced by “Science under siege” will age as well as the science it defends — not because the good guys always win, but because truth and integrity never go out of style.

“Murderer! Murderer! Smug murderer!” The threatening calls from an unknown conspiracy theorist followed Peter Daszak down the seemingly endless hallway of the US Capitol building. Some of his detractors were trying to get him rattled—any reaction, really—holding their phones to his face so they could blast it out to their followers. Also there: Emily Kopp, working for the anti-biotechnology activist group USRTK. She was chastising Peter for causing trillions in damages to the US, following behind him with a professional camera team recording her monologue. This would potentially be good footage for her next attack piece or possibly a movie. After countless books, op-eds, podcasts, and YouTube videos, the lab leak conspiracy genre was lacking a big-screen cinematic experience; rumors about its production had been circulating for months now.

Peter knew it would get bad the moment US Republicans took control of the House in 2022. They had been campaigning as the party of accountability and oversight. A false promise. In reality, they wanted to direct the emotional energy of voters for political gain, whitewashing President Trump’s pandemic failings by using scientists as scapegoats. They also wanted to use the spectacle of public witch trials as campaign events—the offline version of the omnipresent pile-ons from social media. The agitated online mobs had called feverishly for a party that would exert revenge for the trauma of the pandemic, and Republicans were keen to ensure that it was the scientists and their democratic opponents at the other end of that particular pitchfork.

Many pseudo-events had led up to this moment for Peter, from the White Coat Waste Project, using Matt Gaetz and Marco Rubio to cascade awareness of his WIV grant towards an irascible Trump, resulting in its unlawful cancellation on live television. The USRTK playbook included decontextualizing Peter’s emails to give ammunition to conspiracy theorists, while the relentless media onslaught about gain-of-function research stoked a moral panic. Then, the “leak” of DRASTIC’s re-interpreted DEFUSE proposal, the supposed blueprint for creating the pandemic virus. Katherine Eban’s hit pieces cast him and Shi Zhengli as the main villains. All of these were an avalanche of events, in addition to his supposed arrangement with Anthony Fauci as the “kingmaker” of grant funding and the many virologists in cahoots circling the wagon.

Simultaneously, virus hunting had been demonized as well. Myths about the supposed dangers of discovering viruses were powered by biosafety activists, catastrophizing influencers, and sponsored in considerable part by the cryptocurrency fraudster and effective altruism fanatic Sam Bankman-Fried, who donated millions to various media outlets to write scary existential risk stories about virology. EcoHealth Alliance’s mission was recast as creating the conditions for biological warfare, treated by some commentators as the equivalent of nuclear testing. The utility of virus discovery for research and pandemic prevention was ridiculed. Even Republican senators missed no opportunity to blast Peter regularly in the Daily Mail and New York Post for uploading something as innocuous as a short video of a bat eating a banana. Each time he made the news, allegations against him would be recycled and refreshed in people’s memories. No matter what Peter Daszak did or did not do, no matter if he spoke up or withdrew, the drumbeat continued.

The media landscape about him was a bizarre mixture of directed fan fiction and choose-your-own-adventure stories, with multiple co-created narratives about Peter, his role, and his supposed fault mixing, converging, and spinning into ever-new reasons to hate him. His supposed villainy was entertainment at this point, and the third act of his story arc was already prewritten.

“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) led by Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup tweeted in June 2023. They all had big plans for the lab origin myth. In early 2023, they were laying out a path for the public shaming of scientists, first and foremost Peter Daszak, his colleague David Morens at the NIAID, and including Dr. Anthony Fauci. The HSSCP and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (HCOA) were the main tools for those ambitions.

On November 14, 2023, behind closed doors, they pestered Peter with questions for over nine hours. “It is clear that they take it as a fact that we did reckless gain-of-function research,” Peter told me at the time, despite the NIH disagreeing. They also constantly hammered him about his role in the WHO mission and the supposed NIH-sponsored gain-of-function experiment The Intercept had homed in on. And, of course, the DEFUSE proposal, or more accurately, the distorted media version of it. His lawyers had advised him to not argue and contest the many false interpretations of technical details; he would come off as adversarial, and the politicians would blame their scientific ignorance and confusion on him. Rather, he should keep it simple and reiterate that this experiment was not gain-of-function based on the NIH definition and that the DEFUSE proposal was never funded, nor was the work ever conducted. He tried to stick to the advice, but he could not prevent himself from clarifying why certain technical allegations were just false and nonsensical. After the arduous interview, he left uncertain of what would happen next.

Then, radio silence.

Sometime in March 2024, Peter naively thought that he might not be called in for a public hearing. The vibe had seemingly moved on; the HSSCP was focusing their efforts on giving anti-vaxxers a platform, chastising school closures, lockdown measures, and issuing a subpoena to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “to answer for these deadly policy failures.” The usual political clown shows in a heated election year. The rewriting efforts of Trump-era policy failures had apparently shifted towards blaming the Democrats. Perhaps the lab leak narrative was just not that interesting or useful anymore after four years? Some virologists expressed the same feeling; the story was an old and tired trope at this point.

They would be wrong.

Shortly after Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the primary campaign, thereby securing the presidential nomination of the Republican Party again, the winds shifted quickly. His enablers in Congress focused on getting him elected, mobilizing voters anew. With Trump’s chances of winning the White House against an aging Joe Biden looking increasingly promising, they needed to create momentum for the next Republican policy agenda—an agenda that became known as Project 2025.

Briefly, Project 2025 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks. The 922-page conservative policy magnum opus and “mandate for leadership” set out to radically transform the US. It aims to remove a lot of checks and balances necessary for a democratic society, bestowing the executive with unilateral power to implement their agenda and replacing tens of thousands of apolitical bureaucratic positions with pre-screened MAGA loyalists, including in the Department of Justice and scientific institutions such as the NIH, FDA, or CDC. Public health measures and climate action would be virtually impossible under the new regime. It would strip influence and independence from scientific bodies such as the CDC and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and bring them under tight political control. Similar plans have been laid out to remove FDA drug approvals for reproductive health care. Project 2025 is an all-out political assault on US science and institutions. Scientific American quoted Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists, about the Project 2025 agenda:

Such a radical anti-science policy agenda needs many motivated rationalizations to convince ordinary conservative Americans (who remain overall supportive of science) of its appropriateness. The HSSCP and other congressional committees were ideally positioned to create the right pseudo-events for that purpose. Any epic drama starts with a great villain, and the lab leak myth had just the right story ingredients to give politicians what they needed.

The HSSCP announced Daszak’s public hearing on social media on April 4, 2024:

🚨BREAKING🚨

EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will testify at a public hearing on May 1, 2024.

Dr. Daszak must answer questions about COVID-19 origins, dangerous gain-of-function research, and his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

They claimed that “Dr. Daszak and his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research” and that “mounting evidence continues to show that COVID likely originated from a Wuhan lab.” They urged Peter to come to clarify his statements, insinuating he had “directly contradict[ed] previously uncovered evidence about his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology & his oversight of gain-of-function research.” Throughout April, the HSCCP would ramp up their attacks along the same line. Familiarity. Repetition. What they were missing was novelty. So, what’s the twist this time?

The online absurdity reached a tragic peak when scientifically illiterate House representatives started to impose their ignorant interpretation of the DEFUSE proposal upon Peter’s supposed intention, alleging nothing less but a thought crime about a proposal that was never funded and work that was never conducted.

Lying to Congress is a crime.

@EcoHealthNYC President Dr. Peter Daszak told us he intended to conduct risky gain-of-function research in North Carolina. However, recent evidence suggests he actually planned to conduct the research in Wuhan.

On May 1 — we will seek the truth.

Open intimidation. The politicians threatened publicly that if Peter didn’t concede to their interpretation of unreality, he would be in criminal jeopardy. Now, that is new enough.

Like a marketing campaign before a big event, the HSCCP regularly used their Twitter posts as teasers about the spectacle they had prepared for viewers:

In less than one week, EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will appear before @COVIDSelecT for a public hearing.

✔️ COVID-19 origins

✔️ Gain-of-function research

✔️ Wuhan Institute of Virology

✔️ Dr. Anthony Fauci

…and more are on the table.

May 1, 2024 | 10:00am ET

While conspiratorial communities online and Republican-aligned niche media had covered the upcoming public hearing of Peter Daszak throughout April, the overall traction in wider discourse was still limited to a few hundred thousand online people. Sizeable, but not news-cycle defining. That was to change exactly seven days before Peter Daszak’s hearing. Rep. Brad Wenstrup announced the bombshell in the best velocity hacker fashion: Dr. Anthony Fauci was up next. His hearing would happen in June, a few weeks after Peter’s. Now that announcement got the attention of mainstream outlets such as The Daily Caller, The Washington Post, and Fox News, putting Peter’s hearing on the map. Dutifully, Fox News framed Peter’s hearing as the preamble to the main blockbuster:

Wenstrup said that the panel will also hold a public hearing with EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak on May 1 that will serve as a crucial component into the origins of COVID-19 and provide essential background ahead of Fauci’s public hearing.

Free advertisement for the upcoming HSSCP-choreographed influence campaign. Finally, on May 1, 2024, the show was ready to start. And it did with a big bang.

Precisely 12 minutes before his scheduled public hearing, as Peter was still being chased down the hallway, the HSCCP Twitter account posted an official-looking document. It was the Republican majority interim report “recommending EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak be formally debarred and criminally investigated.”

Criminal investigation? Debarment? These are radical actions, especially as their sole evidentiary merit seems to lie in the fact that EcoHealth Alliance sent an NIH progress report in too late. However, with the lab leak narrative, the lack of supportive evidence was never a barrier to action. Peter was indeed referred to the Justice Department for allegedly lying to Congress and misleading funding agencies about conducting gain-of-function research. The NIH was not off the hook either. The report leveraged the same charge of facilitating dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan “contrary to previous public statements, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

In other words, heads were finally going to roll.

Even more cynically, the report openly tried to rewrite history, claiming that “the Trump Administration identified serious concerns with EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of the WIV and instructed the NIH to fix the problem” and that “this intervention likely prevented EcoHealth from continuing to conduct dangerous research.” The shutdown of EcoHealth’s grant in 2020, which had to be reversed because of illegality, was now whitewashed as a necessary and just action. The purpose of scapegoating Peter Daszak and NIH officials was pretty clear:

[According to] evidence collected by the Select Subcommittee, there are serious and systemic weaknesses in the federal government’s—particularly NIH’s—grant-making processes. The weaknesses identified by the Committees not only place United States taxpayer dollars at risk of waste, fraud, and abuse but also risk the national security of the United States. These weaknesses can only be remedied through both executive and legislative action.

Project 2025 officially kicked off.

All of this happened before Peter even read his introductory testimony. But if the verdict was already in, why go through with the public hearing after the fact? Virality, of course. To cement the rewriting of the past in the public’s mind and prepare them for the atrocities of tomorrow. If you make it trend, you make it true.

“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the HSSCP had announced. After all, nothing flies in our gladiatorial arena of social media more than a public witch hunt. In the factional war of all versus all, consensus can only be found when we come together around shared enemies. Politicians know this best.

Peter’s hearing went predictably with posturing politicians trying to look good on camera while reading their prepared monologues. Peter, aware that the verdict was already out, was sitting in as a campaign prop, facing his accusers, getting cut off any time he tried to clarify or correct the record. An exercise in cruelty. He was still fighting for his reputation when the string had already closed around his neck. The setup, imagery, and his futile attempts to satisfy the accusers just provided the gravitas to the choreographed event.

In their monologues, Republican representatives really did not offer to lay out any evidence or examine his charges; rather, they would try to find ways to insinuate and link Peter Daszak´s work to various grand conspiracy myths of the day. First and foremost, he facilitated gain-of-function research in China, helped the Chinese which caused the pandemic. But there were also some tangents and other dog whistles. For example, Rep. James Comer from Kentucky, the ranking member of the House Committee on Accountability and Oversight, tried to paint him as a spy or CIA asset, or at least somehow in cahoots with the intelligence agency. “Does the intelligence community know what happened in the Wuhan lab? Did the intelligence community believe that China was manufacturing a bioweapon?” A nod to MAGA Republicans who believe that the “deep state,” including the intelligence community, was somehow involved in creating the pandemic, to institute vaccine mandates, totalitarian control, or whatever. Peter Daszak answered that it was a question for the intelligence agency, then referenced the 2023 ODNI report, where all intelligence agencies ruled out that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon.

Rep. Michael Cloud from Texas used his five minutes to ask if Dr. Daszak had been engaged with social media companies and whether he agreed with their moderation policies. Nothing to do with Peter, but a dog whistle for a different battle over misinformation and disinformation research, another field of science that Republicans are attacking along with public health, medicine, climate change, and a general evidence-based worldview. He also questioned Peter Daszak’s patriotism and allegiance, given that he works with a country that does “unrestricted warfare against the United States.” More red meat to the broad anti-China coalition in the US. Peter replied that to stop pandemics, we need scientists to go to the places where they emerge and that, ultimately, this is in the interest of US citizens.

Rep. Morgan Griffith from Virginia spent his five minutes in a virtual monologue, talking himself into a rage about Dr. Daszak being a supposed liar while not letting Dr. Daszak address any of his contentions. Overall, a lot of grandstanding was expected from this side of the political spectrum that had long made up its mind about the myths they wanted to buy into. Their verdict and recommendations were entirely expected.

The real surprise for Peter was the other side of the political aisle. Representatives from the Democratic Party had very different goals and talking points prepared, potentially to the surprise of many who did not pay close attention. Their overall goal was to paint Dr. Daszak as dishonest, self-serving, and even fraudulent.

Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz from California spent considerable time claiming Dr. Daszak was conflict-of-interest-ridden given his involvement in the Lancet letter. Why did he not acknowledge he was working with the lab that was the focus of conspiracy theories? The intelligence communities say the question is still open, but “the statement you authored attempted to summarily close the question,” Rep. Ruiz claimed. Peter Daszak explained that conspiracy theories at the time were about bioweapons, HIV inserts, and snake DNA—all prominent conspiracy theories. He did not imagine, back in February 2020, that this statement condemning these circulating conspiracy theories would be a conflict of interest. But Rep. Ruiz was not interested in his explanations, emphasizing that Peter Daszak did not explicitly state that he was working with WIV. Why was Rep. Ruiz so hell-bent on a conflict of interest statement for an opinion letter?

Rep. Debbie Dingell from Michigan took up a conspiratorial talking point about the 2018 DARPA proposal, which was never funded. The anti-science pressure group USRTK had claimed that earlier drafts of that proposal would expose an attempt to mislead the federal agency because of a side note stating that some assays might be performed in China. In reality, the submitted draft to DARPA had more specifications and did not support any assertions that misled the agency. Also, if the proposal had been funded, the agency had to submit and agree on a detailed work plan with exact allocations of where and what work would be performed. Either way, there is no substance to these assertions of a supposed thoughtcrime.

Yet Rep. Dingell was not interested in Dr. Daszak’s explanations of how these allegations made no sense given the grant-making process. She just said, “Well, there are appearance issues here… We won’t accuse you of creating COVID-19, but to the extent that you have considered misrepresenting facts, we consider this a very serious mistake,” she cut him off.

Rep. Deborah Ross from North Carolina went all in on another completely unrelated project that the NIH had awarded to Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli to study coronaviruses in China. The multi-year grant had annual reporting requirements, and there was a problem with the year-five report, which Dr. Daszak had not uploaded on time in 2019. The reason was a supposed banality; a software or related error in the NIH system prevented EcoHealth from uploading the report. “The system locked us out; we contacted NIH; we received no response,” Dr. Daszak explained. He had emailed his grants manager to upload everything; the committee had the emails corroborating that EcoHealth intended to upload the report. However, once again, nobody seemed to care.

“The NIH has conducted an electronic forensic investigation into their report submission systems and found no evidence of a lockout,” she claimed. Rep. Ross went on to state that the rules need to be followed when taxpayer money is involved, and although EcoHealth Alliance had been “exemplary” for four years, that it did not happen in year-five invited questioning from her colleagues. But what exactly were the Democrats questioning? Again, none of this has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19 or the pandemic but about a reporting mishap (at most, a violation) on an unrelated grant.

On and on the Democrats would go about these trivialities, as if EcoHealth Alliance was not an organization with dozens of people, multiple projects, collaborators worldwide, and a million things going on that might sometimes have human mistakes in the mix. The 18-month-long audit of EcoHealth by the Department of Human Health and Services (DHHS) has found some errors but no significant violations, after all. So why were the Democrats so hell-bent on painting Dr. Daszak in a very negative light? Rep. Ruiz stated in his final summary:

I wanna be clear, nothing produced for the Select Subcommittee over the last 14 months, 425.000 documents, over 100 hours of close-door testimony substantiates claims that federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance and the Institute in Wuhan caused the pandemic.

But somehow that would not excuse Dr. Daszak’s alleged lack of transparency. “I do think, at the end of the day, Dr. Daszak, your responses here are unsatisfactory,” Rep. Ruiz would finish up. “You claim you submitted, and yet it was not submitted.” “Your administrative responsibilities and lack of reporting in a timely manner are concerning.” “You are explaining things to your convenience to avoid consequences, and that is concerning.”

Remember, the Subcommittee’s report was released before the public hearing; no matter what Dr. Daszak explained to them, their agreed-upon verdict with Republicans was already in. “It is important that you and your actions as grantees are held accountable,” Ruiz finished his monologue.

The Republican counterparts were happy, congratulating each other for their bipartisan agreement. Rep. Wenstrup had the final word and closed the hearing with skepticism toward scientists. “We cannot just blindly trust the scientists because they are scientists.… Especially when they are not forthcoming and honest,” pointing at Dr. Daszak. “Getting money for a federal grant? That is a problem,” he listed Peter’s supposed crimes. “Hiding behind different definitions of gain-of-function research,” he continued with performatively raised eyebrows.

Rep. Wenstrup clearly enjoyed his moment. “There are scientists in China,” he reminded everybody. “A country that is an adversary to the United States of America.” And Peter was supposedly masterminding a “misleading grant application to DARPA, downplaying the Chinese part,” he gleefully added. “You did not disclose your collaboration with the WIV in The Lancet,” he raised his eyebrows again. “This is a troubling pattern of behavior that we are seeing,” he paused briefly, “and conduct as well,” he added for impact. The hearing between Democrats and Republicans was then closed amicably.

I had watched the hearing live with increasing discomfort, and I wasn’t alone. Scientists from three continents were chatting with me about their unease. “Shitshow” and “The whole thing makes me sick. Political theater at scientists’ expense” would be some of the sentiments expressed. But I think something a bit more concerning was going on.

The Democrats attacked Dr. Daszak because he was considered a weak point in the coming Project 2025 assault on the CDC, NIH, NIAID, and other agencies. Especially with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hearing scheduled just weeks later, throwing Peter under the bus quickly might be the right defense strategy. Already in the interim report, the HSSCP Republicans stated that their goal is to “reign in the unelected bureaucracy, especially within government-funded public health.” Institutional expertise and independence out, political decision-making in.

The Republicans further recommended granting the NIH director or the HHS secretary, both political appointees, not career public servants, “the authority to immediately suspend a grant determined to be a threat to national security.” In other words, they want to make President Trump's action by canceling EcoHealth Alliance’s grant on TV in 2020, which NIH unlawfully enacted, legal for the next Trump administration. In that future, all scientific grants will henceforth be up to the whims of the executive. Good luck with getting funding to study any politically inconvenient topic.

The committee also wants to “incorporate the national security and intelligence community into the grant-making process,” specifically for countries they deem a concern—another vehicle to curtail the independence of science in the US and bring it under political control.

Given these larger political circumstances and the immediate threat to independent institutions, I believe the Democrats decided to try to direct heat away from the NIH and other federal agencies. These organizations awarded EcoHealth Alliance with grant funding for research and are responsible for oversight. They approved the work done in China. They also made themselves liable by canceling Peter’s grant unlawfully at Trump’s orders.

By painting Peter Daszak as this dishonest, conflict of interest-hiding, deceitful actor, the Democrats laid out their defense strategy for institutions. Even if these agencies were found to have financed risky research, or even gain-of-function research, as they all deeply believed to be true, it was without NIH approval. It was not a failure of oversight but deliberate fraud by Peter Daszak. And the unlawful cancellation of the grant in 2020 was just and reasonable given these circumstances.

A convenient political framing. They upheld their oversight but were misled by the uncooperative Chinese and their conduit, the “shady” Dr. Daszak (whose character they just smeared). They then acted decisively to shut them down. In my opinion, they were throwing EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak to the wolves in hopes they would get their fill and relent from pressing Democrats in an ailing presidential campaign. Sounded pretty good if the Republicans let them have this one. Which, surprisingly, they did, at least for now.

Again, this is my interpretation of their actions, as I am not privy to any concrete backroom deal, they may have made with their Republican counterparts. Maybe the Democrats independently decided on that strategy simply because nothing makes for better bipartisanship agreements than a shared villain. The Democrats probably felt that it was a smart move in order to protect the institutions from false allegations of willingly financing gain-of-function research in China.

Nobody at the HSSCP cared that SARS-CoV-2 had nothing to do with gain-of-function research and that no lab could have produced a virus like SARS-CoV-2. The tragic reality was that politicians did not care about any facts or scientific reality, only about their voters’ desires.

Today, 66% of Americans believe the virus came from a lab, many of them feverishly. In a general election year with razor-thin margins and everything at stake, the Democrats certainly did not want to open new avenues of attack against them. No party wants to be in a position of having to educate citizens about technical gain-of-function definitions or defend a complicated scientific reality their voters do not want to believe in anyway. No politician wants their party blamed for the trauma of the pandemic. For the Democrats, it was just too risky to be perceived as defending EcoHealth Alliance, or worse, as the party covering anything up, especially with China involved. The Biden administration has always taken a hard stance on China; the origins investigation was a good topic to show. All Democrats needed to do to create parity with Republicans was to get in on the spectacle. Be even more vicious than them. Who cares about the fate of a non-profit organization with no power to push back? Especially one led by a scientist who makes such a great villain? With democracy itself at stake in the upcoming election?

Politically, they likely saw it as the right move, given the circumstances. Yet by making that political maneuver—that it is better to play into popular sentiment rather than risk exposure by sticking up for facts—I worry that Democrats in the House have embraced the same pugilistic worldview of their opponents and information combatants online, where power and perception matter much more than an evidence-based worldview.

If you make it trend, you make it true. And scientists all over the US felt the political wind shifting.

Prof. Angela Rasmussen told the magazine Science that she “was disappointed that the Democrats joined the Republicans” in what she described as “essentially an attack on science.”

It’s a very dangerous situation because most scientists who are approaching any problem — whether it’s the origins of the pandemic, whether it’s anything else — are going to think twice: should I actually get involved in research that is high impact but potentially politically controversial?

While all these House committee hearings have the makeup of an interrogation and imbue a courtroom feeling, they are anything but. Peter came to testify, but his verdict had been posted on Twitter before he had even read his opening statement. There was no defense lawyer or jury present. Politicians constantly interrupted him to deliver their prepared five-minute soundbite monologues. It was a televised witch trial, not a legal ruling. However, most media treated it as a definitive case anyway.

EcoHealth Alliance and its scientists felt the impact immediately. A five-million-dollar research grant for analyzing the risk of bat viruses interacting with wildlife farms in Vietnam, all but finally approved, suddenly was pulled from the process without comment or justification. This type of work is exactly what scientists believe could elucidate the emergence of COVID-19 through the wildlife industry. Now the human cost and fall-out was real. “It’s crazy to see the death knell of my scientific career mentioned so casually,” Dr. Cadhla Firth, a talented evolutionary biologist who studies zoonoses and works at EcoHealth Alliance, wrote on Twitter in response. Laughs and derision ensued, with commentators happy to point out how she had it coming for causing the pandemic. She replied:

I didn’t start working for EHA until 2021, so I’m not sure what I have to do with any pandemic-related bullshit? You clearly aren’t aware, but EHA isn’t just Peter, there are a lot of amazing scientists in the organization that have never even spoken to Peter.

Two weeks later, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) sent a letter to EcoHealth Alliance, informing them of their suspension from procurement programs and proposed debarment for years. With these actions, politicians hung a Damoclasian sword over the organization, stigmatizing it to the outside world.

“I want to remind everyone that we have not yet been given the chance to respond to allegations.” Peter would clarify on Twitter a few weeks later. He was now gearing up for a legal case because, in the end, the courts need to decide whether or not it is lawful for the DHHS to debar an organization from funding. A measure like that would need to show evidence of substantial wrongdoing, not mostly meritless allegations, and a late grant report submission. “We will contest every one of them, with substantial evidence, both to the HHS & publicly,” Peter showed some fighting spirit.

In an evidence-based world, his chances in court are pretty good, for as long as “innocent until proven guilty” remains a core American legal concept. In a law-based society, everybody deserves a fair hearing and a proper process. Only in the witch trials of old, as well as autocratic regimes, does the burden of proof get inverted. There, the accused have to somehow prove their innocence to the satisfaction of their accusers. Often an impossible task. I fear that, at least in our modern media ecosystems, we have once again reached that point.

“Covidselect has not received anything that proves your innocence, and NIH moved to debar you,” the HSSCP mocked in response to Peter’s above tweet. The cynicism was staggering. After their publicity stunt and blatant abuse of political power, the politicians were the ones who get to define reality now, continuing: “EcoHealth Alliance, under your direction, facilitated dangerous gain-of-function research in China and repeatedly violated the terms of its NIH grant.”

Their implication was clear: he helped create the pandemic and could not prove otherwise. He was guilty until proven innocent. Bystanders reacted accordingly. The comment sections under the exchange were full of calls to put Daszak in jail without trial or sometimes directly to the guillotine. Often replies were accompanied by the hashtag “Nuremberg 2.0,” in reference to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals. Many celebrated that the HSSCP, and by extension, “their team,” finally got the first one of those responsible for the trauma of the pandemic.

It was disgusting to watch, and not over by far. Pouring gasoline on that fire was Alina Chan, with the help of The New York Times. On the day of the Fauci hearing, June 3^rd 2024, they published an elaborately crafted and highly manipulative op-ed with full graphic support from the NYT’s editorial team. The article must have been months in the making, timed perfectly to create buzz for the witch hunt and to legitimize the Republican attack on gain-of-function research and Dr. Fauci, who the op-ed advised to “cooperate with the investigation.” Scientists were shocked to have the paper of record invite a well-known activist to do political propaganda. Multiple outlets featured scathing commentary from scientists about Alina Chan’s piece and NYT’s enabling role in the weeks after. The NYT’s responsible editor did not answer my request for comments about the peculiar timing either. Either way, it was too little, too late to make a difference. The NYT’s op-ed, along with the buzz from Dr. Fauci’s hearing, hit the infosphere like a meteor. A masterpiece of velocity hacking, from the misleading graphics to the headline to the timing of publication. The world reacted. Virologists told me that random bystanders from their social circle who had not thought about the pandemic origins since 2021 asked them whether it was now proven that it leaked from a lab because they had read the NYT article. If you make it trend, you make it true.

While virology, in general, faced the brunt of Alina Chan’s article, the aftermath was even more torturous to Peter. The New York Times’ unethical op-ed legitimized the HSSCP witch hunts in the eyes of the public and elites. Peter explained to me that, for EcoHealth Alliance, it was:

…pretty damaging, because everyone here reads it in New York. And the people who run foundations read it, and the donors read it, and they all think it’s true because The New York Times has done a glossy thing about it.

With the paper of record going all-in on the gain-of-function lab leak narrative, prospective donors and steadfast supporters of EcoHealth Alliance grew hesitant to further support the organization. They had to think of their own reputations. If there is so much smoke, how could there not be fire?

Then came the killing blow. “So, at first the agencies didn’t instantly terminate all the grants,” shared Peter. His organization was involved in many critical research projects around the world, outside of coronaviruses and bats. Studying the impact of deforestation in Brazil or conservation efforts in Liberia would be among those. They were also cooperating with many US universities on projects in South Africa and Borneo. The DHHS suspension and proposed debarment did not demand these multi-year projects immediately stop. EcoHealth Alliance scientists involved in these financed projects would still have some runway to finish up—at least usually.

But that lasted a few weeks, and then Senator Joni Ernst… She wrote to all the agencies, saying, ‘Explain to me whether you have suspended EcoHealth Grants or not.’ So, after that, they started terminating them.

One by one, upon pressure from the same US senator who was outraged by Peter’s “giving a bat a banana” video he shot in Thailand, agencies felt pressured to terminate successfully running and paid-for projects. Projects that were often awarded primarily to US universities with academic researchers in the lead and EcoHealth Alliance only as a subrecipient in a supportive role. Details did not matter. “EcoHealth should never get their hands on bats or taxpayer dollars again,” Senator Joni Ernst stated in her press release.

With these actions, they have been made the ultimate pariah, ending any further cooperation even with US universities. The politician’s signal to the academics and academic institutions was clear: cooperate with EcoHealth and face termination of your grants too.

Systematically, the actions and influence of news outlets, politicians, conspiracy theorists, influencers, and media activists worked together to dismantle any revenue stream to keep EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization for the public good, in existence. An NGO does not sit on a lot of cash; they do not turn a profit; all their grant money goes out to research materials, scientists, and collaborators. If EcoHealth Alliance runs out of money before the court trial about the legality of their debarment starts, even a successful legal defense becomes meaningless. The organization and its people will be long gone. That seems to be the plan—letting them bleed out rather than making their case in court.

By the time we chatted, the court hearing had already been pushed back a second time to a later date. EcoHealth Alliance had to let go half of the staff, often rapidly, because their grants were terminated out of the blue. Brilliant scientists working for the public good are suddenly out on the street. Others hang on by the thinnest of threads, but likely not for much longer either; that includes Peter himself.

“People are very unhappy,” Peter acknowledged, as if life had been sucked out of him. I quickly asked what happened to the international collaborators of EcoHealth Alliance, some of which I got to know. “It’s been a bit of a mixed bag. They all lost our money. Some of them are angry,” he said.

Scientists in Malaysia took it best. When they were cut off, they also had to let go of some staff as well, but “they are determined to raise some money elsewhere.” To not give up. Other collaborators retreated. According to Peter, Supaporn stopped responding. They had a paper:

…that was ready to go on this new virus that’s close to SARS-COV-2; it binds to human ACE2. A clear and present danger… We need to do some more analyses. That’s gonna take some time. We don’t have any money to do that, and that’s not gonna come out. She’s basically not going to publish that work.

Of course, virus hunting has become very controversial in Thailand as well. Supaporn faces a lot of hardship on her own. No Southeast Asian country wants bat scientists to create new data about the pandemic’s origin. Nobody wants to be blamed by a world that has not made its peace about natural risks that span borders, industries, and peoples.

Other EcoHealth collaborators, especially in Africa, were hardest hit. Critical projects and conservation efforts stopped. Rescued animals are again without protection and care. People lost their livelihood or purpose. Anger, depression, and despair had gripped some formerly funded collaborators. The grim reality is that many people, animals, and communities will suffer because of US representatives playing politics with science. Politics with pandemic prevention efforts. Some critically important science will not be done; some will not get published. Training of regional experts and educational interactions with communities will subside. Progress of the last decade will be reversed.

This fallout is a lot to put on a person’s shoulder. Peter Daszak was always proud of the meaningful work EcoHealth Alliance did. To see it all come crashing down is tormenting. “This is, you are going through a horrible psychological torture,” the haunted zoologist confessed to me. The events flashed past his inner eye. What could he have said differently? Done differently? Was he trapped from the start? He confessed before trailing off in thought:

Despite the difficult years, the Peter Daszak I got to know a bit in late 2022 was still a hopeful guy, embattled but not bitter. He had a can-do attitude toward problems; it was part of his charisma. Now, our conversations were more stagnant, almost like an eerie distance had emerged, separating him from the ground he was standing on. His recurring nightmares haunted him because his brain struggled to find a solution to a problem that was not of his creation and remained elusive to his control. He can’t even wrestle control from his lost thoughts anymore. “So it’s right there, and then you wake up, and then it’s reality. And then you have to face your reality.”

§

The HSSCP was not the only Republican-led committee formed to do pandemic revisionism and political propaganda. Four other Republican-led committees also wanted to extract their pound of flesh from scientists, including EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak. Virologists would not be their only target either. Ever since 2023, these revenge committees have called public health experts, institutional leaders, scientific journal editors, and even disinformation researchers in front of Congress.

Innocence was no protection from punishment. In 2023, the HSSCP called in Prof. Kristian Andersen and Prof. Robert Garry to testify about the “proximal origin” paper and Fauci’s alleged role in suppressing the lab leak hypothesis. While the virologists did absolutely nothing wrong and admirably held themselves to the public grilling, making the Republicans look stupid, one might think that they came away well. But that would be wrong. Because Republicans had abused their power and issued subpoenas for troves of private messages of scientists, they could immediately retaliate for their botched hearing. They “accidentally” leaked subpoenaed private messages of virologists to motivated propagandists, effectively tasking them to smear virologists through decontextualization. The USRTK playbook, if you want, but hypercharged by the might and resources of a political party in power. Client propagandists on Substack did much of their propaganda, crafting a malicious character assassination through decontextualizing private slack messages that went viral.

The smear campaign proved not only profitable for the propagandists, but also very effective. Not only did they discredit Prof. Kristian Andersen and his coauthors’ reputations in the eyes of the public until this day, but it was also creating doubt about all virologists and science in general. A year later, right after the Fauci hearing, a New York Times op-ed columnist was given the space to falsely allege that it was scientists like the “proximal origin” authors that destroyed public trust in science. The misleading of the public all started with those lying virologists and “Dr. Fauci’s teleconference” for them. Revisionist history from punditry is all too eager to show scientists their place. In reality, the virologists’ only real offense was to do good science that happened to interfere with political myth-making and popular sentiment.

Unfortunately, politicians wielding the power of the state against scientists will find many influencers and commentators in big newspapers and elsewhere all too willing to legitimize their abuse. Especially when their interests are aligned to shut up and marginalize those pesky fact-checkers and myth-busters that sabotage the popular narratives that made them powerful.

“The point of the exercise was punishment, not oversight,” Renée DiResta would write about these congressional hearings. Disinformation researchers like herself were facing the same treatment by Republican-led revenge committees. She and others had come under fire by Republicans because they tracked disinformation around election interference and influence operations. Their research findings tended to somehow always interfere with what right-wing influencers and politicians tried to sell the public, such as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump or that social media had censored conservatives. So, of course, these researchers had to pay for their audacity to speak the truth, too.

The wild theories spun in the online fever swamps can serve as a pretext for something even more sinister: Politicians, who wield real power, citing propaganda as justification for sham investigations and other forms of retaliation.

“They retaliate, however, because real power is at stake, and discrediting the people exposing them is the best way to cast doubt,” Renée DiResta would further explain. The Stanford Internet Observatory, where her research group was based, was bombarded with subpoenas and lawsuits, racking up legal costs into the millions for the university. Ultimately, Stanford got the message and did not extend Renée’s employment, effectively shutting down the research group. As a reward for her stellar research, Renée also found herself the villain of a networked smear campaign, alleging that she was a CIA spy masterminding the deep state’s censorship-industrial complex. She, of course, knew what would come her way once the ridiculous narrative was picked up by the influential:

It was glaringly obvious to those of us who study propaganda and disinformation what was going to happen: documents and excerpts of interviews would be leaked to ideologically aligned propaganda outlets, and those mentioned in the resulting coverage would be targeted by online mobs.

Retreating from public life offers no remedy against these networked attacks.

Playing ostrich does not stop the rumors or end the story; it simply lets somebody else control the narrative. If you are sufficiently interesting or useful as a villain in a conspiracy theory, the propaganda machine and rumor mill can keep recycling claims and allegations endlessly.

Renée wrote about her experiences in her book. Having a front-row seat to a modern-day witch hunt is certainly not how she expected her research on propaganda to go. As attacks on scientists across the board mounted, we kept in touch. She was not happy but remains steadfast for the moment, hoping that reality will eventually exonerate her work and reputation. “The people who stood up to McCarthyism are the ones history remembers,” she said, referencing another era where the allegiance of scientists was questioned by an authoritarian political movement. A movement empowered by the “red scare” moral panic and enjoying broad societal support.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist, sees parallels between the current anti-science aggression experienced by biomedical science and the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union under Stalin. While history does not really repeat itself, it certainly likes to rhyme. I would offer that such anti-science aggression has become a necessity for old and new powers in the information age who want to entrench their particular worldview and consolidate their grip over public discourse and with it, wider society.

The lab leak narrative enjoys the buy-in of the wider public, as well as motivated conspiracy theorists, activists, influencers, dark-money-funded NGOs, tabloid newspapers, mainstream outlets, politicians, diplomats, even some intelligence agencies, and the leaders of nation-states. A diffuse coalition of convenience, profit, and power, aligned by a shared narrative. That makes the current lab leak alliance no less forceful or dangerous than past ideological movements or moral panics in my opinion.

This is not solely a US problem either. Science is under pressure globally. A broad anti-science coalition aligned with a grand geopolitical narrative is scary and dangerous for any scientist whose research tends to interfere with said narrative. All around the world, virologists and scientists I’ve gotten to know see their work threatened, find themselves targets of abuse, and face general suspicion about their motives from international institutions, governments, and citizens.

We already heard about how Prof. Alice Hughes has tried to pull her life back together. Shi Zhengli has not left China since and has recently felt renewed pressure on her because she dared speak to foreigners, including me. Many Chinese scientists faced repercussions for sharing data, albeit these are rarely as public as when Zhang Yongzhen, who published the first genome with Eddie Holmes, was found sleeping in protest outside his lab. He had lost it. One of my contacts told me about another Chinese scientist losing his position for greenlighting the upload of the Huanan market meta-transcriptomics data that Florence Débarre discovered. Others, who will not be named, are in a precarious situation because they have been talking to Western scientists informally or privately.

Linfa Wang from Singapore, who tried to keep a low profile and not speak up until recently, has somehow evaded being dragged into the worst abuses, although I learned his name is regularly flaunted by Republican Senate staffers. I wonder what happens when the documentary movie comes out to raise public awareness of him. Either way, his students like Wee Chee and other young virologists look into a future of hardship because, on top of all the professional challenges—the painstaking work, the long hours, the isolation—their research brings with it, they will have to contend with a hostile society. A society that does not want them trained and removes funding for the profession, sabotages their publications, and punishes them if they get too visible. Bat researchers everywhere face suspicion and riled-up regional communities that do not want them around anymore for fear of governmental repercussions. That Supaporn Wacharapluasedee in Thailand has broken off contacts is maybe less surprising. She’s had her fair share of hardships, losing her lab once already because of the origin myth, being investigated, and having her collected bat samples destroyed.

Even in healthy democracies, scientists are not necessarily safe. Eddie Holmes and Dominic Dwyer in Australia faced their hardships, with the former recounting a harrowing experience and security incident at his home during the height of the “proximal origin” witch hunt in the US Congress. The Murdoch media empire in Australia is influential, and Eddie makes a great domestic villain for Australian audiences. Even today, conspiratorial mobs insult him, write him messages, and sabotage his institutional email address. British scientists are very much in the same boat. Anti-science aggression has gone global everywhere, and it correlates with how outspoken scientists are.

Merely talking to me was also not without risk. Uploading our interview on YouTube got Brazilian parasitologist Carlos Morel in trouble with the WHO press office. As a member of SAGO, another advisory expert committee to investigate the origins of pandemics, he dared to say there was no evidence of a lab leak. Because he keeps speaking publicly, fighting the good fight for evidence over fiction, he has become a target of conspiracy theorists and their media outlets. Other researchers reach out in private to me, not keen on becoming the next target of online hate mobs or politicians. Junior researchers worry about their careers, but even established professors try to avoid attention in this climate.

Even if not directly attacked, virologists and public health scientists feel pressure mounting from every side. Already on a shoestring budget, frontline defenders against avian influenza and other emerging diseases like Erik Karlsson and Filip Claes in Cambodia need at least five times the manpower to uphold their responsibilities for pandemic anticipation and prevention. However, that support is unlikely to arrive. The WHO has been paralyzed and made ineffective by the geopolitical tap dance around US and Chinese interests. Governments, funders, and NGOs everywhere seem to have lost interest in public health and abdicated their responsibilities of acting to prevent the next pandemic. China even pulled out of international collaborations for wildlife and wet market surveillance and loosened its laws against this industry again. What future are we building for ourselves? How can we mend the bleeding scars of the growing chasm between societal beliefs and scientific research?

Virologists who have been hit hardest have been sounding the alarm not only about their research but also about the damage the false lab leak myth is doing to science.

Science is humanity’s best insurance against threats from nature, but it is a fragile enterprise that must be nourished and protected. The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. Yet, the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.

We must understand that scientists are a minority in every society they are embedded in. Science values evidence over tribal affiliation, which is why it has no friends among political camps or extremists that tend to spearhead attacks on them. Because scientists are just not part of any larger political tribe, and most of society is oblivious to what happens to them in today’s fragmented information ecosystem, nobody comes to their defense when anti-science aggressors come for them.

This has some very direct consequences. First, inconvenient scientists are picked off one by one. Second, anybody who speaks up in their defense might become the next target. Third, nobody is safe to pursue independent research that might interfere with popular beliefs or power.

Take Marion Koopmans, whose role in the WHO mission has been questioned in her home country’s parliament several times. “Right-wing politicians were immediately attacking me,” she recounted what had happened to her. Lawsuits followed. “We had several court cases,” not necessarily restricted to the lab leak myth but often related. For her, it cascaded from the “PCR gate” conspiracy theory to “plandemic” and various anti-vaxx movement-associated narratives. After the WHO mission, she explained, “There was a bombardment of harassment.” She was now part of the origins cover-up as well. When the WHO looked to recruit her again for SAGO, activists bullied them out of the idea. “There was a coordinated effort against me,” Marion said. Alleging conflicts of interest, corruption, cover-ups, and worse. She sent me an Excel file documenting over 200 different attack pieces against her in the media, from bloggers to contrarian outlets to mainstream sources.

Now “We are bringing Marion Koopmans to justice” posters were plastered. Her students are approached by political operatives and conspiracy theorists, trying to get them to go to court against her, supposed witnesses to her many crimes. “I have been told by security advisors that it will go on for some time,” the sharp-eyed virologist admitted her frustration. Yet she was not giving up. The experience has invigorated her sense of importance in explaining science to society. That is the reason she still speaks out, albeit it comes with so much hardship. She has avoided traveling to the US because of safety concerns in such a radicalized country. She’s had security for three years; guards checked every physical meeting she attended.

These worrying experiences abound, especially in the last few years. I have witnessed events that I thought were largely impossible in a democratic society, yet they happened. I have had conversations with scientists who do not feel safe anymore, who self-censor, and who stopped communicating to the public entirely. I have seen essential research projects scrapped, defunded, and scientists giving up pursuit of certain areas of research to protect their careers, their lab members, and their families.

These are not trivialities about social media harassment, trolls, or random junk from the internet. These are existential problems facilitated by an aggressive anti-science movement that saw an opportunity in the lab leak myth. Scientists, abandoned by society, have no chance against their onslaught. Ask yourself: When did you have to change your home address and scrub the internet of private information because you and your family receive daily death threats from hate groups?

When people are continually calling your place of work, protesting outside it, filing lawsuits, and your employer loses funding, do you have the capacity to continue your work?

When your private messages can be subpoenaed by political activists and then leaked to their client propagandists to instigate a national smear campaign, would you feel comfortable talking about a controversial topic even in private?

When New York Times columnists work closely with conspiracy theorists to build their hit pieces against you, are you thinking twice before speaking up for scientists even as a bystander?

When you get dragged in front of Congress in a witch hunt, where they lie about you to your face and afterward refer you to criminal prosecution, do you want to roll the dice that the justice department has not been tainted by the institutional rot impacting every other area of government?

“Where is the public outcry?” Marion asked me. When innocent scientists get harassed, threatened, buried in lawsuits, dragged in front of politicians to denounce their beliefs, or face criminal prosecution? Why does nobody lift a finger? Or worse, why are so many seemingly cheering on the spectacle? “That is worrisome.”

§

“There is no true insight into the nature of reality without liberating ourselves from the noise,” the documentary filmmaker Christian Frei explained to me how his thinking has evolved on the topic. How can we make sense of the present moment?

I believe informational conflicts between our various bespoke worldviews and objective reality are inevitable. It is a battle that has plagued humanity ever since we formed tribal societies with different creation myths, religions, and politics. For most of our histories, these conflicts between worldviews often led to repression of others by various forms of power, subjugation, or bloodshed. Might decided who was right.

With the scientific revolution in the late Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, humanity started on a different project. While still often shaped by power and privilege, the scientific method gradually transformed our knowledge of the observable universe into a more coherent picture. No matter our idiosyncratic, magical, or personal worldviews and politics, science works whether or not we believe in it. Scientific evidence—not might—suddenly could decide what ideas about reality were right (or at least who was the least wrong). Raw power still often won, but over time, the superiority of this new “weight-of-evidence”-based approach became impossible to deny.

Today, the scientific method has been awarded the inherent authority to create, assert, dispute, challenge, and correct information about objective reality. It is the ultimate arbiter of solving informational conflicts or contradictions that constantly arise within our colorful, bespoke worldviews. Science has become the pin that holds us attached to shared reality and, I would argue, each other. It may offer one of the greatest services an enlightened society could wish for: the formulation of a consensus reality based on shared facts. A common ground that allows us to work together and solve problems larger than ourselves. If we want to, that is.

Since its inception, the scientific method has always faced pushback from certain segments of society. Science is a constant danger to religious ideology, shady businesses, and pseudoscience peddlers that rely on myth, manipulation, and magical thinking. Attempts to discard science and discredit scientists by these motivated actors are not new.

In a world of increasingly bespoke realities, what if science has become an existential threat to all our most cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews? To our recently developed online politics, identity, and community?

I believe that today, an entirely new front of informational conflicts has opened between shared reality and our digital world. We all have found ourselves participating in and co-creating bespoke online communities. When the pandemic pushed scientists and scientific topics to the center of society and into the middle of the attention economy, many underlying tensions just escalated, drawing near the breaking point. All that was needed was a good emotional hammer to shatter the glass around the moral panic button about science. Both fringe and well-funded anti-science movements seized on the opportunity. The pandemic, and the lab leak narrative specifically, was their once-in-a-generation chance to topple the supremacy of science and tear society away from supporting and trusting it. An opportunity brought about by technological disruption, vulnerable information ecosystems, and a traumatic global crisis.

The unleashed information war over reality now constantly pits science and scientists (as well as investigative journalists, educators, and other defenders of an evidence-based worldview) against crowds and information combatants arising from all layers of society. Even worse, researchers now regularly find themselves in the crosshairs of those with real power and influence. Science as a global public institution for humanity poses a considerable threat to grifters and snake oil salesmen, populist influencers and narratives, ideological billionaires, unethical businesses, tech platforms, and, of course, state actors and autocrats. They all currently dominate in the world of fragmented and bespoke realities. They all cling to their newfound power tooth and nail, seeking to shape public perception in their favor and to entrench themselves and their separate little epistemic fiefdoms permanently. But how to go about it? In the information age, leading attacks against scientists, gaining ground against the scientific method, and winning decisive battles against an evidence-based worldview have become their avenues of choice to project and defend their influence over society.

With so much at stake and so much to gain, participating in the current anti-science (or anti-reality) movement rewards many networked agents of influence handsomely. Almost anybody can gain popularity, profit, persuasion, or power by undermining the authority, function, and perception of science sufficiently well in the information age.

The marketplace of motivated rationalizations is constantly looking for new, valuable products. That’s why all these networked agents, activists, and agendas seek to portray science and scientists as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. Rather than a public good for the benefit of all, they work hard to cast scientific insights as the opinion of a weird, secretive niche interest group, tribe, or cabal. They paint inconvenient scientific research as ideologically subversive and existentially threatening. Independent science is a thorn in their eyes, something that needs to be beaten in the fight for societal supremacy, public perception, and political power. Their acts of anti-science aggression are what we see playing out in real time today.

But what happens when their viral narratives and emotional falsehoods remain unchecked? When any semblance of a science- and evidence-based worldview is relegated to a thing of the past?

Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky has studied how conspiracy theories and misinformation impact democracies. He and others view the rise of anti-science activism and sentiment as a hallmark of democratic backsliding. “Everything that is a counterweight to power is being undermined,” he explained to me. “I think the goal is to abolish accountability as a stepping stone. That means you got to discredit science.” He and his coauthors argue that science is a critical guardrail for the “epistemic integrity of democracy.” We need a shared set of facts to function in a democracy; without them, any collaboration on shared issues becomes impossible.

“Once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore,” the Kyiv-born journalist and propaganda researcher Peter Pomerantsev said in his Atlantic podcast Autocracy in America. The congressional witch hunt against Renée DiResta had caught his eye.

Democratic decline has become the topic du jour in intellectual circles. Many scholars, intellectuals, researchers, and historians point towards misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, authoritarian politics, social media, and polarization as root causes. I believe everybody looks at a valid subset of the larger phenomena, which I would offer is that our modern information environments have changed how information flows through society and thereby restructured our societies into conflicting and mutually incompatible bespoke realities. Unfortunately, the current information ecosystem asymmetrically favors emotional myths and viral narratives over scientifically accurate content, all while incentivizing us to form our identities and communities in opposition to science.

Yet without science as a pin that keeps us attached to shared reality, I worry about losing everything that we have taken for somewhat granted, including living in a democracy.

Or, as the Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist, puts it even more bluntly:

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.

I’d say that if scientists can indeed be seen as canaries in the coalmine of democracy, carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber. Many scientists went silent and retreated from the public after years of reckless onslaught. Who is going to speak up in the future when the next viral falsehood comes along? We need to act now before it is too late.

As I write this, the false lab leak myth is gaining steam once again, readily invoked by right-wing politicians and MAGA Republicans in the US. It is used not only to target their domestic enemies or activate voters by giving them scapegoats but also in service of a more sinister authoritarian agenda. Leading the efforts again is the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks and the key organizer behind Project 2025, the current playbook for enabling the authoritarian takeover of the US. One of their main goals, called “Schedule F,” is to replace tens of thousands of politically independent public servants and career scientists with loyal party apparatchiks, bringing all institutions under the unilateral control of the presidency. Consolidating power in the executive branch might be a terrible idea for both the independence of science and the future of the republic.

On July 8, 2024, the Heritage Foundation laid out its grand plan for the false origin myth. They assembled “what we believe will be the most important commission in decades” COVID-19 origins group, consisting of former Trump officials involved in the false bioweapon myth like former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Deputy HHS secretary Robert Kadlec, and former CDC director Robert Redfield. The group also included lab leak activist Jamie Metzl, a former Clinton National Security staffer and anti-China hawk looking for influence again. The HSSCP chair, Brad Wenstrup, was there as well for the launch of “a report with actionable recommendations for the president and legislative branch of government to implement right now.”

These people, all very familiar with weaponizing the government, would decide what to do about the lab leak myth in the future when the Republicans gain power again. Here is their fundamental position: make China the enemy. Jamie Metzl, from Heritage’s origin commission, asserted:

There can be little doubt… that the Chinese government is primarily responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all.

Various segments in the US, predominantly but not exclusively on the right, have long cast China as an existential villain, not just a geopolitical adversary anymore. In the factional warfare between bespoke realities, we only come together around a shared enemy. Seasoned politicians understand that principle deeply. You do not work on solving shared problems with your mortal enemy.

Subsequently, the commission outright rejected, even mocked, the idea of ever collaborating with China on shared environmental, climate, and public health challenges. According to a snide comment from one of their speakers, working with China in the past was always a misguided idea that had failed spectacularly. The pandemic supposedly proved this. Jamie Metzl further summarized their points of action, asserting that the pandemic resulted in “18 trillion in losses to the United States,” arguing the only path forward, and “as a means of establishing accountability and discouraging similar behavior in the future, …Chinese companies and the Chinese State must be held accountable and liable for these losses.” Doing anything else would just further incentivize the CCP to engage in “dangerous, aggressive, and secretive behavior,” they claimed. In other words, they will make China pay 18 trillion dollars in reparation to the US, and this will somehow stop the next pandemic, which many of them believe was a bioweapon anyway. An absurd demand and non-sequitur from anti-China hawks designed to escalate tensions further. “We also want other countries to use what we have done as a blueprint to hold China accountable,” John Radcliffe added. He is proposing nothing less than basically a return to a Cold War era with China.

Yet, should the Republicans win political power and even the White House, these fringe positions of the Heritage Foundations will likely become official positions once again. The weaponized lab leak narrative is a trigger they can pull again and again for enemies, domestically and abroad. Other efforts are already planned. Next to ongoing activities by the HSSCP that burned Peter Daszak at the stake of public opinion, there is the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability led by McCarthy-era wannabe and lab leak truther Rep. Comer and the powerful Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The latter will likely see long-term gain-of-function fearmonger Rand Paul take over chairmanship with the election and Senator Josh Hawley in the driver's seat of the new inquisition.

The first sham hearings were held on June 18, 2024, to smear the virologist and “proximal origin” coauthor Prof. Robert Garry as a propagandist while giving Rand Paul’s close collaborator Richard Ebright the stage to spew politically desired falsehoods about bioweapon agents and research. In September, Josh Hawley accused Dr. Carrie Wolinetz, former chief of staff at the NIH, of “actively misleading the American people.” His fulminating monologue was clipped by Forbes Breaking News and received over 1.8 million views on YouTube at the time of this writing. Thousands of approving comments made it clear that people wanted more of this. Self-serving theatrics aside, much worse is expected to come from these revenge committees weaponizing the conspiracy myth.

After years of viral propaganda, the lab leak community has grown to include ordinary citizens, online mobs, client propagandists, commentators, as well as mainstream journalists, and has captured media outlets all the way to both chambers of Congress. With such a powerful amplification network in place, it’s easy to imagine how the emotionally captivating myth could be quickly re-deployed by another Trump administration. Utilizing the right-wing outrage machine, agitated crowds, willing influencers, and mainstream media enablers, political leaders might want to recycle the lab leak myth to stir popular demand for further escalation against China, even to justify military aggression. When the other is cast as an existential threat, all manipulators need to do is fabricate a few novel twists to justify the larger narrative. Instigate some fresh pseudo-events that seem to support what most Americans already believe in and ensure that many dedicated amplifiers are willing to push it repetitively.

If you make it trend, you make it true. How about a new story arc about the evil CCP supposedly working on bioweapons to be deployed against Taiwan? Now, that would catch eyeballs if it could be made to look real.

Novelty, familiarity, and repetition are not only key ingredients to virality but effective manipulation tactics to persuade the masses and shape their bespoke realities. While absolutely far-fetched from today’s point of view, some type of military escalation would not be an unprecedented US response either. After the traumatic events surrounding the 9/11 terror attacks, popular fears and misconceptions about terrorism and old tropes about Muslim fundamentalism were merged and weaponized by politicians. The so-ignited emotional energy could later be directed skillfully with the right set of fabricated pseudo-events. Pseudo-events like the supposed existence of compelling “reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq’s military,” as NPR reported. These misrepresentations were subsequently brought forward by ostensibly credible voices like US Secretary Colin Powell to support the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) narrative. Emotionally activated citizens, their critical faculties blinded by trauma, rage, and grief, ate it up. The mainstream press not only failed to calm the situation but fanned the flames. Instead of critically questioning the evidence and narrative, The New York Times did the most to legitimize the WMD narrative. Ultimately, elite belief in its veracity and the constant media drumbeat created wide public support for the military invasion of Iraq. A remarkable outcome considering that political tensions with the country have been going back decades. Escalations have come and gone. War was certainly not inevitable. Few doubt today that the evidence-free invasion the Bush administration was obsessed with would have been possible without 9/11 as a traumatic catalyst.

Do we really believe the trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic that killed far over a million Americans is any less potent a catalyst if hardline warmongers and anti-China Republicans get their way? Especially if we talk about the authoritarian MAGA movement winning power again? Russia’s Putin already used the fabricated “US Biolabs in Ukraine” narrative (another variation from the lab leak genre) as one of his supposed justifications for invading Ukraine. A sizable proportion of Russians (and sadly, also Americans) readily bought into these fabrications. Every dictator and strongman stirs the emotions of his nation’s people by creating an enemy abroad or starting a war. The purpose of war for autocratic leaders is to legitimize their iron rule at home to call for unity while using it as a pretense to crack down on domestic dissenters. What might an authoritarian second Trump administration, keen to enshrine power and supported by the Project 2025 apparatus handpicked for loyalty by the Heritage Foundation, be willing to do if given the chance?

I honestly do not know what could happen; the example is provocative on purpose. A scenario to highlight that our failure of imagination often makes us blind to how badly things can escalate if we let them. We need to find our way back to epistemic clarity about the world we live in. As Russian dissidents will tell you, when nothing is ever really true, any justification for political actions, no matter how absurd, stupid, evil, or unimaginable, becomes possible. Or take the words of Hannah Arendt, a scholar of totalitarianism:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And people who no longer believe anything cannot make up their minds. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people, you can then do what you please.

That is why I want to fight our epistemic paralysis of the moment.

Conspiracy myths specifically have always been tools for mobilization against certain individuals, groups, races, or even nations. They are part and parcel of the fascist and totalitarian playbook that we have no excuse not to wise up about. How effective conspiracy myths can rouse our feelings and mobilize voters will be shown most prominently in the next US presidential election. I strongly believe the all-consuming political myth-making and the ensuing grand narratives of perpetual conflict against a foreign enemy should be relegated to the past, where they belong.

Irrespective of the outcome of world events, we have to understand that an evidence-based worldview is and will remain under attack globally by networked anti-science aggression and viral meta phenomena within our information spheres. That is the new tragic normal, enshrined in the circumstances and systems we inhabit today.

This means that all types of blatant exploitation of our emotions and crafty manipulations of the public have become much easier with the many vulnerabilities that emerged with our new information ecosystems, no matter who is in power and who happens to catch our eyeballs. We all have to do our part to build resilience and protect our democratic and scientific institutions, ourselves, and our agency from the power grabs of cynical politicians, self-serving influencers, media manipulators, motivated crowds, exploitative algorithms, and the viral narratives that rose out of our collective interactions online and that prey on us from within. That is a tall task for us today, and possibly the only task that matters if we want things to turn around for the better. I also believe that we have the power and will to create the future we want to live in.

One of the most important direct actions that defenders of an evidence-based worldview can take immediately is to not be bullied out of the conversation by (what is in my experience) just networked losers, loudmouths, and lunatics. We all have some influence online. Do not let media manipulators and activists preemptively rob your voice and your impact on others with empty posturing and mob tactics.

We also have to create social friction to slow the spread of harmful viral narratives. Let’s ask for evidence and time to assess before participating. We need to resist the seduction of story tropes when they seem to neatly support our team or worldview, especially when they villainize and dehumanize others. The world is much richer than the usual make-believe villains and heroes conjured up by gifted storytellers. We need to build new online systems that allows rationality and plurality to florish online. Most importantly, we need to hold the line against falsehoods and their amplifiers instead of giving in to bluster, pressure, or nihilism. Let’s defend the scientific method as the best tool we have to approximate ever-more accurate views about our shared reality. It will not always be convenient to do so. Speaking up for something incurs some risk of pushback.

I have no doubt that I will get attacked, smeared, and discredited by the usual agitated lab leak believers just for writing this book. I also expect the book will likely be downrated by organized campaigns on rating websites and ranking systems, as happened to Renée DiResta’s work. Lab leak influencers will likely cherry-pick passages to fabricate outrage or to dismiss my words, and the book will quite probably be overshadowed by the next shiny manufactured pseudo-event anyway. C’est la vie. If that is the outcome, I am okay with it. What is important is that for all their asymmetry of passion, they could not stop me from writing, nor can they stop you from reading the inside story of the COVID-19 origin controversy.

If my book, against the odds, threatens to gain any traction in mass media, it will possibly lead to fiercer pushback. The same tried and tested containment strategies and character assassinations that motivated lab leak believers previously used will be deployed again to try to shut down and discredit the findings of scientists whose remarkable trajectory we followed over twelve chapters. But will their detractors succeed again? Containment is difficult, for good or bad. I would wish for the book to give the scientists another round of attention and a fair hearing to tell their story.

But no matter what happens in the media, I would urge to not let activism and anti-science aggression rob you of your right to hear the scientific evidence from the very scientists who painstakingly produced it. The facts are in; the pandemic was not created in a lab. It is essential to democracy that we do not let those in power rewrite history to their convenience.

On the origins of SARS-CoV-2, scientists did their job admirably, sometimes in the direst of circumstances and at high personal cost. Now, I believe it is on us, society at large. We all can do our part to aid those scientists, help them get the evidence and their stories out, and help each other show up for reality—every defender of evidence-based worldview matters. If we learned one thing from how events unfolded, it is that we need to be networked when it comes to sticking to evidence, too. We all have a circle of influence; how we choose to use or not use it cascades outward. Even a little bit of compassion for science and scientists, and ultimately ourselves and the society we are embedded in, can make a lasting difference.

Science often seems untouchable and locked away in ivory towers, but the reality is quite different. Science is a powerful yet fragile enterprise, done primarily by curious and good-willed humans like you and me. They need the support of society just as much as society needs its scientists. While often not delivering answers as fast, intuitive, or satisfying as we would like, the scientific method as a humanity-spanning collective endeavor still deserves our trust. We would not be who we are without it. Science certainly serves as a critical guardrail against the excesses and abuse of society by politicians, governments, media manipulators, and gladiatorial influencers who crave power, cater to our intuitions, and utilize misleading information as their weapon of choice.

Lastly, we need to become clear-eyed about what is at stake because the sobering reality of our present conundrums does not change when inconvenient science is shut up.

We are integrated into vulnerable information ecosystems we don’t fully understand. We live in an interconnected world that seems currently ill-equipped to face viral threats, both online and offline. Our democratic societies have taken a turn for the worse. We have to deal with perilous political movements while being divided into increasingly bespoke realities. We are currently marching toward a new dark age of myth, manipulation, and magical thinking that all of us hoped to have left behind. The outlook is dire.

But we also have the tools to work against these trends. In Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World, the compassionate communicator offers us science as a candle in the dark. It can illuminate our way forward and keep the many demons of our human nature, as well as of our own making, at bay. We just need to remember that science does not exist in a vacuum; it is deeply embedded in society and done by ordinary humans like you and me. That makes it both beautiful and fragile, and certainly vulnerable to all-out societal assault.

I believe that we all need to reclaim our role as the perpetual guardians of that precious light of the Enlightenment. We have to recognize that we have been sleeping at the wheel as the forces of anti-science aggression, of manipulation and myth-making, of autocracy and nihilism, have been building up their digital war and propaganda machinery. They learned that by using the most compelling emotional conduits who channel our frustrations, fears, and trauma into activism, we could be lured to participate in the gladiatorial spectacle of viral anti-science narratives. They learned to target our tribal human nature and desire to belong to funnel us toward bespoke communities in opposition to science. They learned to root our online identity in their manipulative falsehoods. As a consequence, scientific illumination is once again quickly fading from society.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

It falls on all of us citizens to learn that we have to hold the line and stand up for an evidence-based, democratic worldview. To find community and build identity once more based on our largest shared humanity, not the lowest common denominator. All we currently have to get us out of our self-imposed epistemic crisis is ourselves. No cavalry is coming to magically rescue us from the encroaching darkness. We can't wait much longer on the sidelines either.

Welcome to shared reality.

Let’s get to work.

Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.

Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.

Related links: The anti-autocracy handbook for scholars.

Related links: How social media destroys democratic discourse

Related links: The playbook of anti-science actors - 3 part series

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