I fully appreciated the intended connotation. I simply chose to point out, perhaps with some pedantry, that one does not believe in science. Such looseness in verbiage opens up the bad faith gish gallopers that have become MAGA's "thought" leaders.

Not the majority. A bit less than 20%, the remaining support coming from people who think politics is a tribal engagement like watching a sports team. Or those that listen to bags of hot wind like Yarvin, Rogan, or Thiel.

People want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge.

What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic).

At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc)

I agree with your statement. What I am always trying to understand is where does this lead us and how can we get back to belief in the scientific method? Removing cause/effect/data leaves all decisions to emotion and short term rewards. I don't think this will end well, especially against a background of countries and cultures that do believe in science and collaboration.

It's been systematically undermined for decades through cultivated conspiracy culture, with digressions into wellness woo and evangelical movements of all kinds.

The pitch is the usual anti-intellectual narrative: "How dare these people, with their fancy educations, look down on you and patronise you. Everyone's opinions are equally valuable. They're probably in it for the money."

It's been very organised, and both science and academia have completely failed to respond to it.

You can give science a pass because most scientists struggle to understand how craven politics and propaganda are.

Academia should have known better. Hannah Arendt described it far ahead of time. But somehow plain anti-authoritarianism became less sexy, and certainly less of a career move, than Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, which have turned out to be largely impotent when faced with full-on fascism.