Daily Archives: April 7, 2017

Painting of Edmund Burke by the studio of Joshua Reynolds.

National Portrait Gallery/Wikimedia Commons

This article supplements Fascism, a Slate Academy. To learn more and to enroll, visit Slate.com/Fascism.

Adapted from The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition by Zeev Sternhell. Published by Yale University Press.

While the 18th century is commonly perceived as the quintessential age of rationalist modernity, it was also the cradle of a second and strikingly different movement. In fact, at the very moment when rationalist thought seemed to have reached its peak, a comprehensive revolt against the Enlightenments fundamental views erupted in European intellectual life. From the second half of the 18th century to the age of the Cold War and today, the confrontation between these two modernities has formed one of the most prominent and enduring features of our world.

The Enlightenment wished to liberate the individual from the constraints of history, from the yoke of traditional unproven beliefs. This was the motivation of Lockes Second Treatise of Government, Kants Reply to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, and Rousseaus Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: three extraordinary pamphlets that proclaimed the liberation of man. It was against the liberation of the individual by reason that this new Anti-Enlightenment movement launched its attack, and its campaign was infinitely more sophisticated and subtle than that of the classical, undisguisedly authoritarian enemies of the Enlightenment. This anti-Enlightenment movement constituted not a counterrevolution but a different revolution. It revolted against rationalism, the autonomy of the individual, and all that unites people: their condition as rational beings with natural rights.

This second modernity was based on all that differentiates and divides peoplea political culture that denied reason either the capacity or the right to mold peoples lives, saw religion as an essential foundation of society, and did not hesitate to call on the state to regulate social relationships or to intervene in the economy. Importantly, it did this in the name of a certain liberalismadvocating for a pluralism of values. In making its objective the destruction of the Enlightenments atomistic view of society, this attack announced the birth of a nationalistic communitarianism, in which the individual is determined by his ethnic origins, history, language, and culture.

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A liberalism opposed to the Enlightenment made sense up until to the second half of the 19th century. But when a new society emerged as a result of the rapid industrialization of the European continent and the rise of nationalism among the masses, anti-Enlightenment liberalismoften deceptively attractive because its dangerousness was not always obviousthreatened the very possibility of the survival of democracy.

It was at the end of the decade in 1789 when the Old Regime collapsed in France, and the split between these two branches of modernity became a historical reality. And when the thought of the Franco-Kantian and British Enlightenments was translated into concrete terms by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the British political theorist Edmund Burke put out his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

From the start of his political and intellectual activity, Burke defined the Enlightenment as the guiding spirit of a movement of intellectual conspiracy whose aim was the destruction of Christian civilization and the political order it had created. According to Burke, the essence of the Enlightenment was to accept the verdict of reason as the sole criterion of legitimacy for any human institution. Neither history, nor tradition, nor custom, nor experience could ever fill the role of reason. Burke added that a societys capacity to assure its members a decent life would not be acceptable for the men of the Enlightenment. They are not content with a decent life: they demand happiness, or, in other words, utopia.

Burke denied reason the right to question the existing order. He contended that the existing order is consecrated by experience, by collective wisdom, and has a raison dtre that may not be obvious to each individual at all times but is the product of the divine will present in history. A society only exists through its veneration for history and its respect for the established church and the elites. Replacing the elites with other people and destroying the power of the church may be compared to the conquest of a civilized country by barbarians. The defense of privileges is thus the defense of civilization itself. That is why force has to be used to assure the survival of what exists. In other words, all means were justified to crush the revolution in France.

A true pioneer of ideological warfare, Burke invented the concept of containment, if not the word itself. Though it became famous during the Cold War, Burke first tried the tactic on America. He had been concerned with containing the pretensions of the colonists who were breaking away from the mother country and translating their natural rights into limited political terms, because he had hoped to confine the danger to a distant land and prevent it from spreading to Europe. When this same revolution of the Enlightenment took place in France, however, a policy of containment was no longer appropriate. When it was at the very gates of England, at the heart of Western civilization, one could only respond with all-out war.

Thus, this great British parliamentarian was the founder of the school of thought known today as neoconservatism. Authentic liberal conservatives like Tocqueville in France and Lord Acton in England, or, closer to our time, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, and Raymond Aron, feared the corrupting effect of power. They were the heirs of Montesquieu and Locke, and their great objective was to protect liberty through a division of power and by developing the capacity of the individual to stand up to the authorities. Against this, the representatives of neoconservatism are fascinated by the power of the state. Unlike the classical liberals, they aim not at limiting its intervention in the economy or in society but, on the contrary, at molding society and government in their image.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the historical importance, both in his own time and in the long term, of Edmund Burke and his fellow Anti-Enlightenment revolutionaries. Indeed, the 20th century was only truly born when rejection of the Enlightenment suddenly became a mass phenomenon. It was in a world that was changing at a previously unthinkable pace, when new ways of life, techniques, and technologies appeared all at once, and economic development, the democratization of political life, and compulsory education became living realities that were only dreams for the previous generation, that Burkes legacy gained popular support. Democracy, political liberty, and universal suffrageall recently acquiredappeared to an important part of the urban masses to be a danger to the nation and to modern civilization.

For all these thinkers, rationalism was the source of the evil: it led to materialism, to utopias, to the supremely pernicious idea that man is able to change things.

The year 1936 would seem to be a somewhat unfortunate time to wage war against the Enlightenment. But this was precisely the moment when the German historian and Nazi sympathizer Friedrich Meinecke gave his definition of historism, which demolished the concept of a common human nature, of a universal reason that gives rise to a universal natural law, regarding this way of thinking as empty and abstract. The direct consequence of this concept was a more or less radical general relativism: Meinecke was convinced that German historism was the highest stage thus far reached in the understanding of human affairs.

There was also an attraction of the historist attack on the Enlightenment for the generation of the Cold War in the 1950s. It was at that time that the totalitarian school came into being and one of its chief representatives, Isaiah Berlin, following in the footsteps of Meinecke and in the face of a Europe dominated by a left-wing and often communistic intelligentsia, took up the case against the rationalist Enlightenment. Hypnotized by the Cold War, he launched his attack on Rousseau and then on the idea of positive liberty, and in the name of liberal pluralism wrote a fulsome panegyric to negative liberty.

In his series of essays in Against the Current, Berlin made clear that he considered the principles of the French Enlightenment to be fundamentally opposed to those of a good society. Moreover, his interpretation of the Enlightenment repeats the principal clichs handed down from one generation to the next from Burke onward. These clichs have made a strong reappearance in our time.

For all these thinkers, rationalism was the source of the evil: it led to materialism, to utopias, to the supremely pernicious idea that man is able to change things. It killed instinct and vital forces; it destroyed the almost carnal connection between the members of an ethnic community and made one live in an unreal world. The existing social order, though it may not be perfect, made it possible to live a decent, civilized life. The permanence of Western civilizationthe great Christian civilizationcould only be ensured if its reality was not touched in its essence.

These scorners of the Enlightenment, were not turned toward the past generally. Their nostalgia was for a highly selective historical landscape. Historians of ideas and cultural critics who considered themselves philosophers as well, they saw the nation as the supreme framework of social organization. The kind of solidarity provided by the nation seemed to them greater than that provided by any other form of social cohesion. It is no accident that Burke can be regarded as one of the originators of nationalism.

For Berlin, as for Meinecke, there seemed to be no relationship of cause and effect between the war against rationalism, universalism, and natural rights and the war against democracy and its fall in the 20th century. These people did not believe that blocking and neutralizing the revolutionary potential in society meant abandoning the new social classes created by industrialization to the free play of economic forces, which inevitably gives rise to poverty and hence to revolts and revolutions. And as they advanced into the 19th century, the role assigned by these thinkers to the state was to control democratic tendencies, viewed as a threat to the natural order of thingsas demagogic illusions.

The inevitable process of democratization, the progressive access of the male population to universal suffrage, did not reconcile these liberals opposed to the Enlightenment to the principles of democracy. Instead it caused them to accept the disagreeable and, as they saw it, dangerous realities of political democratic rule. Some became conscious of the role a state could play in intervening in the economy in order to curb and canalize democracy. Some resisted democracy until they died.

It was also no accident if, as a result of seeing themselves as the defenders of a minority point of view, all these nonconformists ended up creating a new kind of conformism in promoting concepts that very soon became commonplace.

The most common reproach that the Anti-Enlightenment thinkers continually made to the people of the Enlightenment was that of having never left their study or the realm of abstractions, and as a result, being ignorant of the realities of the world as it was. It was Burke, one of the best parliamentary orators of his age, who originated this idea, but in fact it was only a myth.

Beyond all that divided the founders of the United States from the men of the French Revolution, the heritage of Locke and the Glorious Revolution of 1689 from Rousseau and Voltaire, or James Madison and Alexander Hamilton from tienne Bonnot de Condillac, Condorcet, and Saint-Just, there were certain convictions that were common to both parties. They were all convinced that they were working in a specific context to change or create a given situation and at the same time enunciating principles of universal significance. They were working on behalf of their own time, they wanted to change a world that was theirs and only theirs, but at the same time they had an acute awareness that they were initiating actions that would affect posterity without any possibility of return.

The most cogent example of the dual nature of their work was the fate of the most important piece of political philosophy ever produced in the United States. The Federalist, a simple collection of electoral pamphlets written during the campaign in New York State for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, had a clear and well-defined primary objective: to convince the population of this pivotal state that both liberty and property would be preserved and protected in a federal state with a strong central authority. Invoking the authority of Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, it also sought to show that liberty did not depend on the size of a country but on good institutions.

All while waging an excellent electoral campaign, The Federalists writers, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, were perfectly conscious of the universal significance of their writings and actions. The Constitution dealt with the concrete problems that the Americans of the end of the 18th century had to confront, and it was voted in because it corresponded to their needs and hopes, but it formulated general principles that the founders thought to be just and good and consequently valid for all men in all times and places. This opinion was never disproved in the course of the next two centuries.

It is true that this is an almost perfect example: men called at a critical juncture in the history of their community to provide solutions to concrete political problems in a country on the margins of civilization gave answers of universal value and produced a classic of political thought. And in fact, the same can be said about Burke. It is likely that if the revolution was merely a reaction to a crisis of regime, a palliative to deal with bread riots or financial bankruptcy, an accident en route or the product of some machination, Burke would not have risen to the level of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or The Federalist, and his pamphlet, simply intended to fill a breach through which he saw the flood pouring in, would not have become, for more than two centuries, the intellectual manifesto of revolutionary conservatism.

All these writers wrote with the immediate application of their ideas in mind, but at the same time posed fundamental questions about human nature and the role of man in society. They gave an idea of what they thought a good society should be. They all tried to transcend the immediate context in which they lived and felt that they were stating eternal principles and essential truths. All the thinkers of the Anti-Enlightenment reflected on the rise and fall of civilizations and did not hesitate to position themselves within a perspective of 25 centuries when they engaged in dialogue with Plato and the principles of Athenian democracy.

The contentious coexistence of the Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment movements is one of the great invariables of the two centuries between our world and that of the end of the 18th century. But this is a point that generally escapes the attention of historians and critics of culture: If the enlightened modernity was that of liberalism which led to democracy, the anti-enlightened modernitycoming down into the street at the turn of the 20th centurytook the form of an intellectual and political movement that was revolutionary, nationalistic, communitarian, and a sworn enemy of universal values. Whether it is a matter of reactionary modernism or the conservative revolution, one is always confronted with the same phenomenon: the content and function of this movement remained the same. Its pet aversions remain Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, and the philosophes of the Enlightenmentthe founders of the principles on which the democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries were founded.

Adapted from The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition by Zeev Sternhell;translated by David Maisel.Reprintedby permission of Yale University Press.

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Anti-Intellectualism Is Just As Revolutionary As Liberalismand Much More Dangerous - Slate Magazine

Troy Schumacher is a corps de ballet member with New York City Ballet, one of the mostprestigious dance companies in the country. And while a job as a full-time athlete might be enough for some people, Schumacher is also the artistic director and choreographer for his own chamber-sized troupe, BalletCollective. All of its members are Schumachers fellow dancers at NYCB.

For the companys latest performance at the New York University Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Schumacher explored his observations of how human bodies respond to built space. He approached architects James Ramsey, founder of RAAD Studio, and Carlos Arnaiz, founder and principal of CAZA, to collaborate on a project that would turn design into dance. Last season, I was already sold on the idea of working with architects because I thought our processeswould be very similar, said Schumacher. Whether youre creating performance or buildings, youre thinking about somethingthat has a larger scope but shows details. Youre thinking on two scales.

(Courtesy Whitney Browne)

Schumacher and his team took care to thoroughly investigate how the two disciplines could come together for a final project. We discussed how our respective disciplines are organized, how we record our work, how we make changes to our work as we go, and how our respective practices overlap, said Arnaiz.

Its not unusual for architecture and dance to go hand in hand. Just last year, Steven Holl created set pieces for Jessica Lang Dance, while the Guggenheim Museum frequently holds performances in its iconic rotunda. But these dances coexist with built architectural elementsnot so for BalletCollective. Instead, Schumacher chose to feature the dancers in a stripped-down environment. The stage at the Skirball center was entirely bare, with curtains lifted to reveal the dancers waiting on the sides, and their costumes were casual rehearsal wear. Until they started moving, there was no indication of the evenings architectural component.

One of Schumachers strengths as a choreographer is his unusual way of using formations. He often asks one dancer to move against the group or pairs a tall woman with a short man. Trios and duets are widely spaced around the stage, playing out contrary to the traditional ballet structure of a principalcouple and a shifting background of corps dancers. In Until the Walls Cave In, Ballet Collective dancers moved through lines, boxes or huddles that washed across the stage. Ramseys work, in comparison, also carves out space where heretofore there was none. Jamess work is about restoring or facilitating life in a place where it wouldnt normally exist, said Schumacher. We were really driven by light, concrete spaces and the growth happening within them.

(Courtesy Whitney Browne)

For his part, Ramsey entered the collaboration unsure of what to expect. I had little to no idea about the creative process for dance, Ramsey said, and I was completely blown away by how naturally our processes were able to mesh. Our conversations had to do with the lifeand death of human spaces, renewal, and the idea of tension as a dramatic architectural design tool. Here, though, Schumacher might have picked something up from his collaborator. The start-stop energy of his choreography makes it nearly impossible to establish dramatic tension.

Arnaizs contribution involved one specific drawing, resulting in The Answer, a duet for Anthony Huxley and Rachel Hutsell. Choreographers are always looking for new pathways, said Schumacher. Carlos emailed us a sketch on top of a photo of Allen Iverson. I was floored by the energy and idea behind it, and we just went with it. Arnaiz wrote about Iverson in his recent monograph, reflecting on how static geometric forms are brought to life by the creative process of architecture. As a result, The Answer plays off friendly competition.

Huxley is an elegant dancer who, while still able to have fun, is quite serious onstage. Hutsell, who is just beginning her professional career, might be expected to be timid, especially dancing with Huxley (he is several ranks higher than her at NYCB). Instead, shes remarkably grounded for a woman dancing in pointe shoes, which can complicate quick direction changes and off-balance steps. She eats up space with infectious energy. The dancers darting limbs seem to leave trails of lines and spirals across the stage, reminiscent of Arnaizs drawing.

Schumacher wasnt worried about disappointing audiences who might have expected structures or set pieces designed by Ramsey and Arnaiz. All the artists who contribute to BalletCollective are a source, he said. But invariably, the starting and ending point arent the same place. Asking for architectural input is about giving us a place to start.

Arnaiz and Ramsey were both surprised at what that starting place was able to yield. Ive worked with musicians, but never with dancers, said Arnaiz. It was fascinating to see how something transformed from concept to physical performance. Ramsey agreed: Troy brought a level of clarity and rationalism to the projects that was startling, and even led me to understand my own work more succinctly.

What Comes NextBalletCollective The NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts October 2728, 2016

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How James Ramsey of RAAD Studio, Carlos Arnaiz of CAZA, and BalletCollective turned design into dance - The Architect's Newspaper

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had attracted the ire of traditionalists when he wrote more than once that the cow is not a divine mother but only a useful animal. A substance is edible to the extent that it is beneficial to man. Attributing religious qualities to it gives it a godly status. Such a superstitious mindset destroys the nations intellect, he wrote in 1935.

Recent events have not been a good advertisement for the national intellect. The party that pays homage to Savarkar has never come to terms with his modernist rationalism. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Gujarat has amended a state law so that anybody found guilty of cow slaughter will be awarded a life sentence. The chief minister of Chhattisgarh has said that those who kill cows in his state will be hanged. Even acts of homicide or sexual assault do not usually result in the hanging of the guilty. Meanwhile, there is a massive crackdown on abattoirs by the new state government in Uttar Pradesh, ostensibly targeted at illegal establishments, but clearly trying to hurt the Muslim community that dominates the meat trade. Congress leaders such as Digvijaya Singh have said his party will back a nationwide beef bana useful reason to remember that the original laws against cow slaughter were introduced in many states when the Congress was the hegemonic force in Indian politics. This also opens up the possibility of competitive cow politics. And footloose vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to attack any person they believe is harming the sanctity of the cow, even by just throwing a stone at an animal. There have traditionally been two main arguments in favour of cow protection. First, the cow is the pivot of an agricultural economy. Second, it is central to Hindu religious beliefs. Neither of these two arguments can justify the harsh punishments that are rather casually being talked about. The economic argument does not survive an empirical test. First, as farming in India becomes increasingly mechanized, the demand for draught cattle in the fields is falling. Second, as milk-producing cows grow old and become unproductive, they become a financial burden on farmers. If farmers cannot sell them off to slaughterhouses, they either abandon the animals or starve them to death. Third, the rational response by farmers to the ban on cow slaughter has been to prefer buffaloes to cows, as is evident from both the official cattle census as well as price trends in cattle auctions across the country. The economics of an asset totally changes when its terminal value suddenly comes down to zero. Economists such as V.M. Dandekar and K.N. Raj showed many years ago that the factors determining cattle population are not slaughter bans or religious sentiments but the demand for livestock products such as milk and meat as well as the levels of technology used in agriculture. Indeed, the directive principle of state policy that says cow slaughter should be prohibited is itself derived from the economic argument. Article 48 of the Indian Constitution needs to be read in full: The State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle. The issue of religious sentiments is a more tricky one. There is ample proof in old religious texts that beef-eating was not uncommon in ancient India. However, that does not necessarily mean that the current generation of Hindus should not worship the cow. There is also the undeniable fact that cow slaughter was one of the flashpoints in medieval India under Muslim rule. The real issue right now is that the state has no right to send someone to jail for killing an animal. It is also important to remember that beef is one of the cheapest sources of protein. Some 80 million Indians eat either beef or buffalo meat, including 12.5 million Hindus, as shown in an article by Roshan Kishore and Ishan Anand in this newspaper in October 2015, based on their detailed analysis of sample data. This does not mean that devout Hindus who worship the cow should not voluntarily devote themselves to its protection by setting up gaushalas, or cow shelters, though there simply arent enough of these to cater to the growing number of abandoned cattle. The problem lies elsewhere. Bans on the killing of cows are in effect a burden on farmers who own cattle. Punishment for consumption of beef is an attack on the basic Constitutional right of every citizen to live the life she wants to. (http://www.livemint.com)

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Going overboard with cow protection - Kasmir Monitor

The YouTube video shows girls convulsing in hospital beds, on the floors of their schools, losing control of their bodies, unable to walk or talk.

The young women have allegedly just been given shots of the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Instead of a lifesaving treatment, theyre left crippled, chemically lobotomized.

A voice over the disturbing footage screams: I am not a slave. You cannot force me to inject my kid with this poison. This is sick!

That voice belongs to Owen Shroyer, a reporter for Infowars, the right-wing, conspiracy theoryladen news site. Hes anchoring a classic Infowars health segment, featuring a passionate rant against mainstream medicine. In this case, the subject is a favorite on Infowars: vaccines and the damages they do to our youth.

When Shroyer appears onscreen again, his face is flushed and twisted in rage. You know what? Im sorry but F you! Okay? he says, squinting at the camera. F you if youre going to sit here and watch a video of young girls literally convulsing because of a vaccine that you say is safe and effective. F you! Youre disgusting.

If you know anything about the HPV vaccine or vaccine safety, its easy to dismiss this video as fringe lunacy. But Infowars is no longer a peripheral media player. The website now reaches more than 6 million unique US users each month. The YouTube channel has more than 2 million followers about as many as Vox.

I watched more than six hours of the show, and came away steeped in a dark view of the world. On Infowars, truth is provisional, science means nothing, and you cant trust anyone especially not your doctor, researchers, or experts of any kind. This is a parallel information universe, with deep suspicions of the establishment and government agencies and a deep appreciation for the populist president, Donald Trump.

As a medical reporter, Ive written a lot about shady peddlers of health misinformation; Infowars felt like familiar terrain. Exaggerated claims, cherry-picked studies reported out of context, and the promise of treatments and foods that will either kill or cure are more the rule than the exception in this corner of journalism.

But Infowars makes Dr. Oz and the Food Babe seem benevolent. The show goes so much further than simply misleading people about their personal health choices and a range of other subjects. Jones and Infowars are part of a political movement aimed at undermining and delegitimizing the institutions that are fundamental to democracy especially science. They also have connections that run all the way up to the White House.

Alex Jones is an ally and champion of President Trump, who told Jones in a 2015 interview, You have an amazing reputation. Trump may disparage institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post on Twitter and Fox News, but he shares Infowars articles and videos.

It doesnt seem to bother the president that Jones has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories through his various media channels. Jones launched his first radio show in 1996, and the day after 9/11 he went on the air calling the tragedy an inside job.

A theme he returns to again and again is that the US government is actually controlled by an international faction called the New World Order. The globalists big banks, billionaires, mainstream media, pharmaceutical companies are actively conspiring against the interests of regular Americans.

Jones has said Oprah Winfrey is trying to reduce the African population by half, that Sesame Streets new autistic Muppet was designed to normalize an increasingly common disease thats caused by vaccines, and that the Atlantic and other lefty periodicals are hinting at an imminent decapitation of President Trump.

In this world, Andrew Wakefield, the discredited doctor who falsified data to suggest vaccines are linked to autism, is a pioneer and trailblazer who just wants to help keep people healthy. By contrast, Bill Gates is running a mass eugenics effort through his charitable work, and the HIV epidemic was actually created by the American government (which has incidentally been part of a Russian disinformation campaign about the US government).

Jones often talks about the pedophile rings that elites are helping to organize, and his suggestion that Hillary Clinton was running one out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, was the reason a man walked into that shop with a gun last year threatening to kill people, in what has become known as Pizzagate.

Inciting violence is one problem with the show. Less obvious but equally worrying is that over the years, scientific experts and doctors have been popular targets, and empiricism and rationalism are under constant attack.

According to Infowars, vaccines are just one part of a serious attack on our health. Its also happening with fluoridation of the water supply, GMOs in our food, the chemicals in the environment, and the medications prescribed by doctors.

More recently, Infowars has aired segments about another health problem youve probably never heard of: a rarely discussed fungus epidemic [that] is spreading throughout America. Its a useful example of how the site spreads misinformation and denigrates science.

Instead of actual researchers, the fungus segments feature Infowars associate Dr. Edward Group. Group is not a doctor but a naturopath who also frequently alleges that researchers and mainstream medicine are colluding with government in a mass conspiracy to poison people. Hes said Food and Drug Administration officials raided his office because he was onto a promising cure for cancer. (I reached out to Group to interview him for this story. He declined the request.)

To establish this fungus epidemic, Group draws on science or the feeling of science. He talks about all the research hes done, and refers to citations from stacks of papers in front of him to support the idea that fungus and yeast overgrowth is causing everything from brain tumors and brain fog to skin conditions, itching, difficulty with vision, anxiety, fatigue, and the obesity epidemic.

It really is a problem most people are not familiar with, Group says on the show. The scientific community is deliberately hiding this fungus from view. As a matter a fact, most doctors and hospitals really do not take the time to check people for fungal infections.

Not to worry: Group and Jones have the solution.

They are peddling supplements called Myco-ZX to fight an epidemic theyve invented. Group claims the pills cleanse the body and boost the immune system to fight fungal overgrowth. These fungus fighters are one of numerous health products hawked on the show.

Watching these segments, I felt confused, disturbed. I understood why people might believe Jones and Group. Its hard to falsify many of the health claims they make. They also draw on real uncertainty and problems in science medical studies are often funded by the drug industry; the industry has done shady things to undermine the entire research enterprise.

The health care system has also failed many people. Doctors make mistakes and leave patients jaded and suspicious of their expertise. Medicine has come so far over the past century, but it often falls short of patients expectations. Its not difficult to see why the quick fixes and simple solutions Jones offers the game-changing pills to fight the fungus thats really causing all your health woes might resonate with millions of Americans.

Theres also the current political climate to consider. An environment in which people are distrustful of institutions can be fertile ground on which to promote conspiracy theories, said Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College who researches misperceptions about politics and health care. With Infowars, Jones is tilling that soil.

Exaggerating scientific uncertainty to sow doubt and confusion is nothing new. We saw this during the tobacco wars. We see this in the ongoing debate about climate change (which scientists agree is not actually a debate). Fake news isnt novel either, nor is medical misinformation on the internet.

Whats different about Infowars is the concerted effort to undermine institutions and politicize topics that have mostly been neutral like immunizations for children.

Dr. Oz may have brought anti-vaccine campaigners on air or spread magical thinking about health, but he didnt wrap it up in identity politics. Jones and his associates do, making a rejection of the medical establishment and science part of what it means to be on the populist right.

If to be skeptical of vaccines means to be a good conservative, [theres a problem], said Alan Levinovitz, a professor of philosophy and religion who has been studying pseudoscience. This misinformation is dangerous when it gets tied up with political ideology.

It's concerning in part because of the right-wing media's growing influence over the GOP. Infowars frequently calls on Trump to enact policy based on conspiracy theories. Sign an executive order to take fluoride out of the water! Group said once. And while the administration doesn't seem to be entertaining that particular idea, it's conceivable that the show could have some influence over the shaping of vaccine or abortion policy with deadly effects.

Science as an institution has, for hundreds of years, been viewed as the best method for producing knowledge. Until recently, science has also been relatively sacred across administrations and across partisan lines, said Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Once we start eroding [science], we get into dangerous territory, he added. Think about how important science is for national security, how important it is for business. The very laptops this stuff is being written on wouldnt be possible if not for the science thats under attack.

This war on science playing out in the right-wing media is poised to damage one of our most valuable institutions a key driver of the economy, a source of our military strength and leadership in medical and technological innovation. In the Infowars universe, though, science is the enemy part of the globalist elite movement thats poisoning people, keeping them down. Anyone who cares about evidence and science: Ignore this seething movement at your peril.

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I watched Alex Jones give his viewers health advice. Here's what I ... - Vox