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The administration's assault on science feels eerily Soviet

The United States is drifting ever further away from science and climate reality. So why does life seem so normal?

Lysenko the idea that genes pass traits down as a “degradation of bourgeois culture,” and couldn’t understand why cows bred to produce more milk did so simply because they had “advantaged ancestors.” He attempted to “educate” crops by soaking them in freezing water, thinking that could force them to sprout in winter, and that orange trees would grow in Siberia if exposed to the right stimuli. Over the years, Zeldin received around$300,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, and before joining the agency he was a top executive at the America First Policy Institute, a group co-founded and funded by fracking billionaire Tim Dunn. This ability to shape public perception operates largely beyond the reach of the law — as became clear when Trump abruptly fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics just hours after a disappointing jobs report, or when he planned to close the observatory that monitors carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa, one of the world’s most important sites for tracking climate change.

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