James' World 2

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The U.S. is bracing for another summer of powerful storms and wildfires, on the heels of an unusually warm winter and spring, and the monthly shattering of ocean heat records. Beyond the now-annual threat of smoke that last year blanketed the nation, a thickening haze of lies also looms—about everything from global warming and wildfire smoke to abortion and racism. To break through the dense fog of propaganda on media and social media, those who value scientific integrity will need to expose and rip apart the increasingly interconnected fantasies spun by the anti-reality industry.

With the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falsely calling climate change a “hoax” invented by China, a former tobacco and coal lobbyist brazenly lying to Fox News viewers that last summer’s dense wildfire smoke posed “no health risk,” and an Alabama court redefining frozen embryos as “children,” the consequences of indulging decades of antiscientific agitprop are clear. Conservative think tanks and lobbying groups have spent tens of millions to push false messaging and draft restrictive laws around abortion. The false messaging has included lies about its prevalence, basic biology, and reality in women’s lives. To energize far-right voters, these groups have attacked transgender health care with the same playbook, yielding more than 400 anti-trans laws in 2024 alone. They’ve demonized vaccines and masks, minimized harms from tobacco and wildfire smoke, and denied the realities of climate change and COVID. In the classroom, where many anti-reality crusaders have long fought against the teaching of evolution, they’ve expanded to banning books about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity, while attacking global warming education.

Overcoming the mounting harm from the parade of con artists gaslighting the public won’t be easy. More scientists and journalists must help clarify how right-wing ideologues have twisted science and weaponized anti-reality. Ongoing efforts, though, are already revealing the radical motives of such extremists, who share sophisticated ploys, influencers, and, often, deep-pocketed funders.

Meredithe McNamara, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, describes denying reality as one of the main “disinformation playbook” tactics: “The first move is, if you want to ban some sort of care or advance a toxic policy, then deny that the condition for which care is sought even exists, or make false claims about it,” she told me. Denying the existence of dangerous pregnancies or gender dysphoria, directly parallels the denial of COVID, systemic racism, and air pollution.

A 2020 analysis by the climate change-focused journalism site DeSmog revealed that climate denialists share extensive overlaps with those “spreading COVID misinformation, touting false cures, ginning up conspiracy theories and fomenting attacks on public health experts.” Activists affiliated with the Heartland Institute, an oil and gas industry–funded booster of climate denialism, repeatedly attacked COVID public health measures. Some have woven those threads into a wild conspiracy theory about a plot by “eco-radicals” to restrict personal freedoms. Conservative scholars at the even more influential Heritage Foundation, also funded by oil and gas magnates, have misleadingly portrayed COVID and climate models as highly sensitive to “assumptions,” and suggested that climate model advocates “often try to beef them up to satisfy an agenda.”

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