The author does a really nice job of tracing the current dystopian misinformation campaigns to events in the 1950s and 60s, including the response to new NSF-sponsored high-school science curricula back in the 1960s, e.g. the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS yellow, green and blue versions). Does anyone remember those? I know they certainly impacted me positively when I was in high school in the mid-70s. They were terrific, evidenced-based teaching materials embodying both rich modern content and John A. Moore’s notion of “science as a way of knowing”. They also included well-crafted, intentional professional development for teachers. Moreover, that kind of rigorous thinking in the 1960s and 1970s strongly influenced both the first and second versions of national science education standards in the early 1990s and again in the early-mid 2000s0, which also have been lambasted by the same kind of non-truth-seeking deniers. One result, as the author notes, was the rise of “Creation Science”, which is as strong if not stronger today than back then. See, for example, the work and budget of the conservative Discovery Institute, and the influence of Michael Behe’s “irreproducible complexity” argument in “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.
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Indeed, the fundamentalist revolt continues but in a different, more virulent form with bigger, more effective, and more well-funded megaphones, and more tools to mobilize and influence people not to think rationally. It’s masterful skulduggery. I agree with the author that that is our great, and arguably existential challenge.