Overcoming the mounting harm from a 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 #HeartlandInstitute, 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 #HeritageFoundation, 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.”
Gutting government oversight except in defense of the traditional nuclear family is a strategy spelled out explicitly in documents like the Heritage Foundation–led #Project2025’s "Mandate for Leadership"
-- a guidebook to the goals of a second Trump administration.
It would slash multiple agencies, ranging from NOAA to the Department of Education,
and sharply reverse decades of U.S. climate policy.
Francesca Tripodi, a senior researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, says
one goal of repeating the myths and disinformation is to activate “deep stories” that are told so often that they feel true.
Science has long been distorted to push the racist narrative that Black people are inferior, for example,
thereby justifying their enslavement and subjugation while perpetuating the myth of white supremacy.
More recently, that narrative has extended to vilifying the Black Lives Matter movement and diversity, equity and inclusion programs as being themselves discriminatory.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-must-face-down-the-expanding-anti-reality-industry/