Big Science Intensifying Indoctrination

Big Science has long excused indoctrination, but now they
are going all in for “interventions” to target non-consensus views

The Big Science Cartel (BSC) as J. Scott Turner labels it (19 Aug 2022) is alarmed that so many people question their authority. There are, of course, wacko views and conspiracy theories out there. Historically, those have been dealt with by debate and exposure: i.e., more speech, not less. Victorian philosophers like John Stuart Mill respected people enough to believe they would judge scientific explanations rightly based on who presented the best evidence.

The leftist materialists and evolutionists after Darwin were among the strongest voices for freedom to explore non-traditional views. Once they got power after the Scopes Trial, though, their mood quickly changed. It was time to squash their opponents.

Flush with power and money in this internet age, the BSC is turning up the heat even more. Contra Michael Crichton (19 July 2022), they now preach that science is Consensus, and anything outside the Consensus is by definition “misinformation.” Their patience with consensus deniers has run out. They are joining the Cancel Culture, and have shown willingness to use underhanded means to enforce compliance. Their term for this activist stance is “intervention” – they feel a need to intervene when people express non-consensus views.

Lemmings, by JB Greene. Used by permission.

Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media (Science Advances, 24 Aug 2022). A European team treats consensus skepticism as a disease. How do you prevent disease? By inoculation. They made up some cartoony videos and ran experiments to see if it helped survey participants build up immunity to certain social media claims. See also the press release about this paper from the University of Cambridge.

This paper has some good points. Rather than shutting up dissent, the authors are trying to teach critical thinking. This is similar to what our CEH Baloney Detector does: warn people about logical tricks that charlatans try to use on them. The Euro team tries to get ahead of the game; instead of debunking and fact-checking news after it’s out there, they are trying to “prebunk” it with their analogy of inoculation against disease. You can watch the European team’s first five “inoculation videos” on InoculationScience.com as part of the team’s “Truth Labs” project.

The crude but somewhat effective videos warn viewers about emotional arguments, incoherent arguments, false dichotomies, scapegoating and ad-hominem attacks. The idea is well and good. They’re crude because of the stock characters (the “scientist” drawn like Einstein vs the evil deceiver with black mustache, etc.), but there are other concerns. The videos employ logical fallacies to prebunk logical fallacies. If these are intended as tools for teachers, would they allow for Q&A by students? Would they allow students to use these videos against consensus views?

“You may have noticed that the very people who lie to you constantly, every single day, as loudly as they can, those same people are the ones who accuse you of spreading ‘disinformation’ always.”
—Tucker Carlson, Fox News, 1 Sept 2022

CEH routinely detects all five fallacies in textbooks and papers about Darwinian evolution. Would the “Truth Labs” folks be willing to expose those fake-science methods of mind manipulation? How about creating videos exposing Bandwagon and Groupthink in Big Science? How about one on Card Stacking? The Darwin consensus is guilty of numerous fallacies listed in our Baloney Detector. Let the “Truth Labs” project turn its microscope around once in awhile and focus on fallacies within the BSC.

In the press release, readers can listen to Sander Van der Linden, a professor of social psychology and contributor to the paper, discuss the Truth Labs “Inoculation Science” project in a 7-minute video. The urgency of the project, he begins, turns on the rapid spread of information on social media, but clearly misinformation worked well long before the internet, as his string of stock footage of Nazi propaganda shows. That’s but one case of “incoherence.” Further, his entire presentation revolves around the faulty analogy of prebunking with medical inoculation, to which he piles on fallacies with terms like boosters, herd immunity, and new interventions against mind viruses that “mutate” over time.

Van der Linden comes across as a truth-loving, likeable chap, but his own leftist bias becomes evident in the film. What images does he choose to characterize misinformation? Predictably, he uses multiple photos of Donald Trump with a MAGA hat, rioters at the US Capitol on January 6, skeptics of Covid-19 and other card-stacked images intended to manipulate viewers into equating conservatives as the primary purveyors of misinformation. I did not see one instance of a leftist or liberal liar.

There are other concerns: his group has teamed up with governments and tech giants to prebunk what they consider misinformation, without acknowledging the many and serious examples of censorship and spread of misinformation by those entities. Worst, Van der Linden talks about truth without having a theory of truth. He just assumes it. But as an evolutionary psychologist, his only toolkit involves power and manipulation. And so this quasi-truther uses misinformation, logical fallacies and propaganda tricks to advance his project, in which he hopes to manipulate the world with “interventions” operated by the most powerful (and suspect) promoters of misinformation in the world today! How about some debate, sir? Get out of your academic echo chamber. Get out and talk to regular folk. Attend a church and learn about the theology of Truth. Read about your eminent Cambridge forerunner, James Clerk Maxwell.

If Van der Linden and his colleagues succeed, misinformation will be defined as disagreement with the BSC. And they will use psychological tricks as interventions to ensure compliance with the intellectual tyranny of the Consensus. Somewhere along the line, these guys left Science behind and hired on as political activists, doing their work on the inside of the BSC. We’re not the only ones saying that BSC has become ideological, lost its credibility and betrayed the ideals of science. Read Wesley J. Smith’s piece today at Evolution News.

Getting people on board with the energy transition: ‘Times of crisis can help’ (Leiden University via Phys.org, 29 Aug 2022). Scientists have sure gotten uppity lately. Aren’t they supposed to work in a lab quietly and discover observable, repeatable facts of nature? What makes these people intent on manipulating their fellow Homo sapiens to support the Green Agenda? The lead manipulator in the article sounds like Rahm Emanuel advising “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”

Timing is crucial to such a large-scale energy transition. How do you get the public on board at such short notice? “When it comes to the timing, times of crisis can help,” says [Alien] Van der Vliet. “People can see that these are turbulent times and that helps motivate them. They know there’s a war going on and that this has caused a gas shortage. They understand the circumstances.” As people live in the present, they find it easier to make decisions that have an impact now.

Is Alien (that’s really her name) willing to let others use a crisis to manipulate her back? If so, we know of some crises that might motivate her to action. Would she help get President Biden to stop sex slavery and drug trafficking at the Mexican border? Could we motivate her to stop persecution of Christians in Nigeria? Could we motivate her to stop children’s hospitals from performing irreversible damage on kids and teens in the name of transgenderism? Or has long membership in the BSC infected her with the dreaded Yoda Complex? Well, now we know. She reveals the reason why her activism is biased: Evolution!

If there was only going to be a gas shortage in a few winters’ time, it would be harder to motivate people to change. “That’s normal from an evolutionary perspective. You want food and shelter and you want them now. That’s why it is so hard to get people to make more sustainable choices from the climate perspective. But a crisis like the one we’re currently experiencing with the war is close at hand and you can feel it in your pockets right now. Then people show willingness and the flexibility to change.”

Wait a minute, Alien. If you have an evolutionary perspective, then evolution is what evolution does. If it makes people short-sighted and selfish, so be it. That’s nature, and whatever is, is right (from an evolutionary perspective). Why are you reaching outside of your worldview to persuade people to violate their evolutionary heritage? ‘Because humanity might go extinct!’ she might scream. But from an evolutionary perspective, most organisms have gone extinct, and that’s OK. That’s the nature of a godless, aimless, purposeless universe. Stuff Happens.

Ways to strengthen democracy, as determined by Stanford-led ‘mega study’ (Stanford News, 29 Aug 2022). Here comes another “study” from academia (prepare to be hoodwinked). This is not just any study; it’s a “mega study” (prepare to be mega-hoodwinked). Do you expect the results to be fair and unbiased? “A Stanford-led project has identified a set of strategies to counter anti-democratic attitudes and reduce partisan animosity.”

Whenever the words democratic and democracy appear in academic verbiage, reader caution is advised. The academic elitists are usually not talking about a Constitutional Republic like the US system. No; they use the word like communists mean it in “Democratic Republic of [North] Korea” which is, of course, one of the most anti-democratic tyrannies in world history. Another tip-off is the word “governance” which conservatives rarely use, but global elitists use routinely.

So what is Stanford’s “scientific evidence” for threats to democracy? Right up front, we see “bogus claims about election fraud that eventually culminated in former President Donald Trump’s allegation that the U.S. 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – and their implications for democratic governance.” This comes right on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation that the FBI approached Facebook in October 2020 to quash the explosive evidence of Biden corruption on Hunter Biden’s laptop, calling it “Russian disinformation.” Consider Stanford’s fraudulent coverage of election fraud:

• the FBI knew full well that Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic, having had it in their possession for months. Polls have shown that many voters would not have voted for Biden had they known about that story that Twitter and other Big Tech giants censored—possibly enough voters to have swung the election against Biden. Wasn’t that a threat to democracy?
• Stanford’s “science” article (echoed uncritically by Phys.org, a “science news” site), did not examine the accumulated evidence of fraud documented by Mollie Hemingway in her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections (2021, with 3000 five-star ratings)
• nor did they cite the Time magazine article that openly admitted to a conspiracy to change election laws, massively expand mail-in voting for the first time, and reduce longstanding procedures to ensure voter integrity (see 20 Feb 2021). Was that a threat to democracy?
• Clayton and her handlers omitted the fact that Mark Zuckerberg sent nearly half a billion dollars to install leftist activists in election offices in key swing states in 2020. Was that a threat to democracy?

Predictably, in its very lopsided and unscientific coverage, Stanford’s press release points only to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol as a “threat to democracy.” Stanford gave the mike to a student inductee in their PhD program, Katherine Clayton:

“We decided to juxtapose footage of unrest in failed democratic states against the Capitol insurrection to suggest that the United States could be headed down a very dark and scary path if citizens do not affirm commitments to democracy,” Clayton said.

And yet Clayton and her Stanford leftist handlers ignored many disturbing aspects of the event, such as

• episodes of police incitement as shown in onsite video clips in “The Real Story of January 6” (Epoch Times) of Capitol police throwing concussion grenades into the crowd, beating a woman senselessly, and shoving a man to fall twenty feet to serious injury. Were those threats to democracy?
• the possibility of FBI agents stirring up the crowd
• videos of Capitol police welcoming crowds of people inside
• the lack of investigation of Ray Epps calling for the crowd to go inside the Capitol when crowds suspected he was a plant (shouting “No! Fed! Fed! at him)
• the murder of veteran Ashli Babbitt by a rogue Capitol police officer with no warning or consequences to him
• vans of Antifa and BLM rioters sent to infiltrate the crowd
• the lack of FBI investigation of the pipe bombs planted at the party headquarters in DC
• the hundreds of arrestees from the crowd put in solitary confinement for months without being charged, still to this day unable to talk to their families or see a lawyer, in clear violation of the democratic conventions and Constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights. This is especially troublesome after BLM and Antifa rioters had burned American cities, killed cops and caused billions on property damage the prior summer with no consequences. Was that a threat to democracy?

Was Stanford’s treatment of these issues scientific? Is “political science” a science at all? Does this biased propaganda belong on a “science news” website? Where is there equal time for a conservative to respond?

“There’s a lot of research in psychology and political science suggesting that emotions can shape political attitudes and behavior,” said Clayton. “We were interested in whether we could harness one powerful emotion – fear – to reinforce citizens’ commitments to democracy. We think that part of the reason that citizens may not always profess their commitments to democratic values is that it is difficult for them to envision what it would look like if democracy failed.”

Let Stanford tell us all about about “anti-democratic beliefs that threaten the country’s political future” when they themselves are using fear and propaganda to push their biased coverage of Republicans and conservatives, saying nothing about leftists, progressives and Democrat Party threats to democracy. Their juxtaposition of riot videos from Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Turkey and Russia against conservatives and Trump supporters on January 6 is a classic case of the association fallacy and fear-mongering. It’s especially ironic to realize that those “failed democracies” were not democracies at all, but tyrannies of Leftists. In every campaign speech, President Trump praised America’s sacred Constitution and its guarantees of freedom and God-given rights.

Stanford is training inductee Clayton into the use of “interventions” to steer the public its way. Watch out for that word. It’s a threat to democracy.