> This is especially on the Left, who are too ready and willing to spark that ruin, viewing legal systems and power only as a tool to control their opposition, who has valid stances on myriad topics. On the Right, they complain a lot, but at least they aren't using any means necessary to actively change the fundamental course of people's lives
If you look politically, it is just as true, and historically much more so I feel from the American right, which has normally had the church and the puritans on its side, and has always fought to get sex, LGBTQ, minorities, and even science removed from popular channels of discourse.
Also, as someone who follows the science, I'm not seeing 100k+ researchers with published data refuting the science. Doctors are not all scientist. Most practitioners have their own belief system, often from their own daily biases. And in the medical science community, it turns out, those things are being investigated, but are still far from being unambiguous and evidence backed. The policy makers are taking risks one way or another, because they're having to make decisions with limited scientific analysis, data, and experiments.
When you think of scientific consensus, what do you think it means? It is a confidence score in the current state of data and experiment. It is an assessment of given what we know today, what is most likely true. You can take bets against it, because it is probabilities and not certainties, science is always probabilistic unlike religion. But if you're a policy maker, taking a bet against the current odds seem like a gamble you shouldn't be making.
Thus from my stance, this is all political, and science is doing the right thing, and most policy makers that follows scientific consensus are just playing it safe with the odds.
The people who are trying to discredit science and the consensus are taking political bets, they want to discredit things to gain power, in the off chance the consensus is wrong, they win big politically, in the many more likely odds they'd be wrong, most people won't notice and it won't make the news.
The effect of it all though, from my point of view, is actually that it is used once again by the right as a way to convince people science is wrong all along. Which goes back to my initial take, historically, the right has always tried to silence science, and this to me is just another attempt at discrediting its processes and misrepresenting it's propositions and stance. It's trying to get people to instead believe that the political leaders and key scientists that have become agent of politics are more trustworthy than science itself, and that they now should listen to them exclusively for the real truth.