October 8, 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Donald Trump was on television this morning sounding manic but not coughing. It seems he’s gotten another steroid shot and is feeling better.

He attributes his recovery, or has in the last week, to the new monoclonal antibody cocktail from Regeneron that he took early in the course of his disease. And it may well be a wonder drug.

What is almost never discussed in news reports about this, however, is that Regeneron developed this drug the same way most monoclonal antibodies are developed and tested: using tissue from abortions.

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to put on the Supreme Court a woman who would not only end all abortions, but would outlaw in-vitro fertilization and possibly even birth-control.

The war on science that Republicans have been waging for the past 40 years has two foundations.

First, Republicans have opposed any sort of science that would expose how destructive fossil fuels are to our planet or that would hold industry and big agriculture to any liability for the poisons they are spreading throughout our environment.

The second foundation of their opposition to science is religious fanaticism. Big business and the millionaires and billionaires it creates are not a large enough voting block to gain political power, so back in the 1980s the Republican Party reached out to hard-core fanatics in the religious right and brought them into their coalition of billionaires, bigots and bullies.

Now the GOP is more and more resembling a softer American version of the Taliban: embrace the religious fanatics, openly oppose public education and science, and do everything possible to disempower women.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this morning, “There is nothing ‘pro-life’ about denying people comprehensive sexual education, making birth control harder to access, forcing others to give birth against their will, and stripping them of healthcare and food assistance afterwards.”

Now Trump is calling Kamala Harris a “monster.“ Like so many men in the Republican Party, he has complete disdain for women and people of color.

They’re doing everything they can to drag us back to the feudal 15th century, with Senator Mike Lee even arguing that America is not a democracy.

The world is facing a cascading series of crises, from climate change to overpopulation to the destruction of life on earth that has become so extensive scientists are now referring to the “insect apocalypse.“

Science is increasingly critical to saving human civilization, at the same time these people are embracing positions that date back to beliefs that emerged during the Bronze Age.

America must rejoin the rest of the civilized world and reject anti-science religious fanaticism and the domination of society by oligarchs and kleptocrats.

The fate and future of the world is at stake.



Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

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