[larl]

While anti-science exists at both ends of the political spectrum, only one of the major us political parties seems to embrace conspiracy theories with gusto. And that party has a not insignificant number of adherents that accept the belief that covid is a hoax.

But notice that you've shied away from the climate change claim; the scientific consensus has not gotten softer in the last 20 years, but as recently as a few years ago one party denied the existence of climate change. Even recently a considerable majority of the strong adherents of one particular political party disbelieve that climate change is happening.

[Frondo]

One more data point in terms of political parties' views on science: there are two people in the White House now who believe that evolution is a hoax, Mike Pence and Mark Meadows, both of whom derive that belief from their religious practices.

Does a leader need to believe that evolution is a process that happens to be an effective leader? Not necessarily, though it may hinder their ability to make informed choices when, e.g. dealing with a pandemic whose causal agent is evolving.

(Does a leader need to accept a heliocentric model? Again, probably not, very little in the way of political life depends on the leader's cosmology at that scale, but for some reason it would make me deeply uncomfortable if we ended up with a president some day who insisted the sun revolved around the earth.)

[TheAdamAndChe]

There's also a large percentage of the population whose religious beliefs preclude a belief in evolution, especially in certain regions of the country. In a democracy, you don't get to suppress certain viewpoints or beliefs because science disagrees with them. You get a representative of the people.

[lawnchair_larry]

You mean like the silly Russia conspiracy theory we wasted so many years on?

[nl]

Read the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee report.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

[lawnchair_larry]

I’ve read it. Like I said, total conspiracy theory. Nothing in there to suggest Trump was involved in anything, and we know now that the infamous Steele dossier was bogus.

[nl]

> Nothing in there to suggest Trump was involved in anything

No. But so many members of his immediate circle are named as being involved.

> we know now that the infamous Steele dossier was bogus

This is a weird thing to say. The Steele dossier was presented as a set of unsubstantiated claims which required further investigation.

Disproving a limited number of them (eg, Michael Cohen doesn't seem to have been in Prague when one of the claims said he was) doesn't show much except that specific claim is unproven.

Additionally, many of the allegations have been proven!

Notably - and amusingly - the "pee tape" part of the dossier hasn't been disproved at all. Given the huge amount of attention that has gained one would think holes would have been found by now. The Mueller report actually adds some weight to this story, noting how a Russian associate of Cohen had claimed to have "stopped the flow of tapes" from the owners of the hotel Trump stayed in.

Read for yourself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier#Veracity_and_co...

[lawnchair_larry]

That’s not how evidence works. The onus is not on Trump to prove a negative. And crucially:

”Rtskhiladze later admitted he had been told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen, the report says.”

Literally a hoax.

[nl]

> That’s not how evidence works. The onus is not on Trump to prove a negative

Of course. As I said - it was a set of unsubstantiated claims. Some turned out to be false, but some didn't. It wasn't a bogus dossier.

> Literally a hoax.

So you pull the one footnote from that which supports your viewpoint and ignore all the rest that doesn't?

The point wasn't if the tapes were fake: the point was if Trump believed they might exist.

[0xB31B1B]

yea, the silly thing is that we all really underestimated or at least accurately estimated the involvement of Russian actors in the rise of trump in 2016. This is cannon, and the report was written by republicans.

[EricDeb]

Like the current "massive voter fraud" conspiracy we're currently wasting time on