From Endless Frontier to Enemy of the People: The Assault on Public Science

Nearly 20 years ago, a colleague and I documented the campaign against climate scientist Michael Mann after he developed what became known as the “hockey stick” reconstruction of historical temperature patterns. For the oil and gas sector, already facing mounting public pressure, Mann’s findings were deeply unwelcome.

What struck us most at the time, however, was not simply pressure from private actors but the degree to which governmental institutions themselves became vehicles for the attack. In 2004, for example, a congressional committee subpoenaed Mann’s scientific records, correspondence, and data stretching back decades. As we documented in our 2012 book “Bending Science,” legal and political tools were increasingly deployed to harass, suppress, or reshape research that political figures, often working at the behest of industry backers, sought to discredit in the eyes of the public.

Twenty years ago, Mann’s case felt exceptional. Two decades later, it no longer does.

In “Science Under Siege,” Mann and Peter Hotez argue that what once appeared aberrational has become routine. Coordinated disinformation efforts, harassment campaigns, strategic lawsuits, and personal assaults now accompany research in politically contentious fields. These attacks jeopardize not only professional standing and funding but, at times, physical safety. Increasingly, they also bear the imprimatur of public authority.

The authors describe themselves as “two scientists who never dreamed during our training that we would come under these sorts of attacks and find ourselves reluctantly dragged into a war against those denigrating our fields of science.” Their experiences recall Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”: Publicly funded research that generates politically inconvenient knowledge becomes grounds for isolation and retaliation.

Pairing Mann’s story with that of his co-author, a vaccine scientist, underscores the book’s central claim. Hotez recounts sustained media attacks, organized harassment, and in one instance, physical assaults severe enough to require police protection outside his home after he refused to debate vaccine safety with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Joe Rogan show. The problem, the authors show, is neither confined to climate science nor reducible to a single individual. It reflects a broader transformation in the political economy of knowledge production. Young scientists observing these campaigns may rationally choose safer research agendas, reshaping the scientific workforce and its research goals through fear and self-censorship.

Diagnosing an Upside-Down World

Although the authors’ personal narratives give the book urgency and immediacy, its larger ambition is diagnostic. Mann and Hotez seek to explain how we arrived at a moment in which anti-science disinformation has become, in their words, “orchestrated,” and credible scientists are recast as public enemies.

Seventy years ago, federally supported research was often celebrated as creating an “endless frontier”—a driver of economic growth, national strength, and democratic vitality. Today, the incentives often run in the opposite direction. When scientific findings threaten entrenched economic or political interests, science itself becomes the target.

To explain this inversion, the authors identify five reinforcing forces that together generate sustained pressure on publicly funded science—what they alliteratively call plutocrats, petro-states, pros, protagonists, and the press. Rather than treating attacks as episodic or personality-driven, they map them as systemic features of the modern political economy and information environment.

Plutocrats: Funding the War on Science

The first “P” is perhaps the most obvious: wealthy and “malevolent” individuals and companies threatened by regulation. In climate science, fossil fuel companies fear restrictions on production and consumption. In public health, supplement manufacturers, alternative medicine promoters, and “wellness” entrepreneurs resist evidence-based oversight. Although the authors focus their book exclusively on climate and vaccine scientists, other work shows that these types of attacks and disinformation extend across many domains of industrial activity in which rigorous research (including legal research) threatens profits.

Within climate and vaccine science, Mann and Hotez document how these wealthy actors can devote enormous resources to undermining science that threatens their economic interests. Influential figures such as the Koch brothers, Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch fund think tanks, litigation, media campaigns, academic front groups, and public relations firms. They weaponize legal procedures using subpoenas, defamation lawsuits, and strategic litigation. They finance harassment campaigns aimed at discrediting individual researchers. In some cases, the plutocrats’ influence operates more subtly, shaping research agendas by sponsoring studies whose framing or methodology aligns with their financial and regulatory ends.

Petro-states: When Governments Join the Attack

The second “P”—petro-states—builds on this foundation. Governments dependent on extractive industries align state power with corporate interests.

Mann and Hotez focus primarily on foreign countries, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. Russia, the authors observe, has a “horrific legacy of waging war on science and its scientists” for more than a century. Today, Russia partners with ExxonMobil in social media disinformation campaigns on climate change and helped spark the Climategate saga. But the authors also trace echoes of these dynamics within the United States during periods of deregulatory governance. When political leaders perceive scientific findings as threats to revenue streams or governing coalitions, they marginalize inconvenient research, redirect funding priorities, and at times actively mislead the public. As one example, the authors discuss how the “McCarthy-style” congressional investigation of Mann’s research in 2005 was not an isolated event and that related events occurred in his home states of Pennsylvania and Virginia as well. Similar tactics also pervade vaccine politics, where scientists such as Hotez are publicly targeted, drawn into politicized confrontations, and subjected to harassment in ways that blur the line between scientific disagreement and reputational attack. In such environments, scientific institutions within government risk becoming instruments of political control rather than independent sources of knowledge.

Pros: Manufacturing Doubt

Next come the “Pros”—credentialed experts who specialize in sowing doubt. These figures resemble the “merchants of doubt” described by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2011 book. Sometimes trained in unrelated disciplines, they present themselves as independent skeptics raising legitimate questions. The late Fred Singer, trained as a Cold War physicist, dedicated the latter part of his career to “undermin[ing] acceptance by the public and policymakers of the science of ozone depletion, tobacco, and—last but certainly not least—climate change.” In reality, many of the pros like Singer are sponsored by industry or aligned with political interests hostile to the scientific findings they question.

The pros’ seeming intellectual authority supplies talking points, citations, and technical language that transform manufactured doubt into seemingly respectable dissent. In an already-polarized information environment, their criticisms and counternarratives often carry disproportionate weight.

Protagonists: Amplifying the Message

The fourth “P” consists of influencers, broadcasters, and platforms that disseminate the “anti-science” narratives generated by the pros.

Figures such as Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, and Paul Driessen, along with algorithmically amplified networks, spread conspiracy theories “uniquely crafted to feed narratives of climate or pandemic denial and inaction.” Social media plays a central role. Bots and coordinated campaigns magnify their reach. Messages are packaged in emotionally resonant, easily shareable formats.

Because many of these networks are financed or supported by plutocratic and state actors, misinformation can quickly overwhelm the modest communicative capacity of scientific institutions. It can even confuse genuine health and environmental advocates, sowing divide-and-conquer dynamics in which activists begin questioning—or attacking—serious researchers.

The Press: Performative Neutrality

Finally, the Press enters the picture.

Mann and Hotez critique ideologically driven outlets such as Fox News and Murdoch-affiliated media. But they also fault mainstream journalism for creating false balance or “performative neutrality.”

In striving for balance, major outlets such as the New York Times sometimes treat manufactured controversies as legitimate debates, juxtaposing expert consensus with fringe dissent and thereby creating false equivalence. This framing confuses audiences and reinforces uncertainty. Over time, even well-informed readers may struggle to distinguish credible knowledge from propaganda.

Meanwhile, the authors observe how some academics caution “honest” scientists to just stick to the science and avoid “policy advocacy.” That admonition, according to Mann and Hotez, drives technical experts still further away from the very public communication channels where their voices are most needed.

A System of Reinforcing Pressures

Taken together, Mann and Hotez argue that these five forces generate a self-reinforcing system. Well-funded actors manufacture doubt, states legitimize it, credentialed contrarians supply expertise, influencers amplify it, and journalists normalize it. The result is not merely misinformation but a destabilized public understanding of what counts as credible knowledge, producing what the authors call a world of “anti-science.”

The stakes, they argue, are not abstract. “Anti-science has already caused serious illness and mass casualties in the near term. Unmitigated, it will in the long term take millions more lives[.]”  Empirical research supports this concern: Sustained disinformation campaigns measurably increase public confusion, dampen support for regulatory protections, and contribute to vaccine refusal and other harmful personal decisions. Climate science and COVID-19 research become framed as hoaxes or political tools rather than public goods.

Reform: Fighting Back

The final chapter turns to reform. Channeling the spirit of a Lord of the Rings warrior, Mann and Hotez frame their proposals as a three-stage campaign.

First, they call for collective action within the scientific community: stronger training in public communication, institutional resources to protect scientists under fire, and more proactive engagement with disinformation. Second, they urge political reforms aimed at counteracting polarization and authoritarian drift in the United States—a tall order, though they argue that historical precedent offers grounds for cautious optimism.

Third, they advocate for tightening regulation of the disinformation infrastructure itself, such as strictly limiting dark money, policing false information on social media, and imposing sanctions or tort liability on those who knowingly spread harmful disinformation. Although the authors acknowledge that the First Amendment poses a significant obstacle to many such measures, they express some optimism that recent litigation may leave space for certain forms of government response. In particular, they point to Murthy v. Missouri (2024), in which the Supreme Court declined to restrict federal officials’ noncoercive communications with social media companies, dismissing the challenge for lack of standing. Murthy did not resolve the First Amendment limits on government “jawboning,” but by dismissing the case on standing grounds the Court may have made future challenges to such government efforts substantially harder to bring. That advantage for legitimate government efforts, however, also carries the obvious risk of insulating government communications if officials use their powers to manipulate scientific information.

None of these reform paths is likely to be a panacea. Indeed, aside from encouraging stronger coordination among scientists themselves, many of the authors’ proposals—particularly those aimed at restructuring the political or market systems that sustain disinformation—appear politically remote. The authors seem aware of this fact; near the beginning of their final chapter they argue that, in spite of the uphill climb, it would be a mistake to give up and become disillusioned—after all, “this is what the forces of inaction want.”

What the authors’ framework leaves underdeveloped, however, is attention to the mid-level arenas where scientific distortions frequently occur, often with the tacit encouragement of the legal system. While high-altitude political shifts will be invaluable, there are, in the meantime, numerous problematic legal processes and institutional design flaws that can be tweaked and adjusted—sometimes without political fanfare—to better align legal rules with the goal of enhancing and encouraging high-quality scientific information. As the authors themselves seem to intuit at scattered points in the book, many of the tactics used to harass and chill scientists succeed because legal procedures are being exploited. Targeted legal reforms—such as sanctioning the abuse of open-records laws and subpoena powers; requiring rigorous conflict-of-interest disclosures in government processes; curbing nontransparent opportunities for political control of scientific funding and analyses; and imposing targeted sanctions for abuse of process, frivolous litigation, and misconduct claims—are urgently needed in the interim. As long as science deniers can advance their self-interested ends by abusing legal processes without consequence (as is currently the case), they will rationally push the envelope of what the law permits. Cutting off these opportunities one by one may ultimately make substantial progress, even without a sea change in U.S. politics, the judiciary, or restrictions on dark money.

Despite the incompleteness of their reforms, Mann and Hotez’s blueprint provides a useful road map for identifying the many institutional pressure points through which anti-science campaigns operate. Markets, political institutions, and legal rules all create opportunities for disinformation to persist and at times even thrive. By tracing the forces that exploit these institutional vulnerabilities, the authors help identify where countermeasures might be directed, even if the precise reforms remain contested.

An Underlying Tension

Yet one significant tension in the authors’ argument receives surprisingly little sustained attention: how to distinguish ends-oriented assaults on science from credible disagreement within it.

The line between credible skepticism and unfounded critique is not always clear. What one respected scientist might characterize as an assault on science may be considered by another to be legitimate dissent raising credible evidence and serious concerns. For example, the authors treat the lab-leak hypothesis for COVID-19 as largely discredited. By contrast, in “In Covid’s Wake,” Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee fault public health scientists for prematurely dismissing that possibility, in part out of professional self-interest. More broadly, Macedo and Lee argue that scientific advisers during the COVID-19 pandemic sometimes overstated confidence and understated uncertainty, contributing to post-pandemic distrust in science among significant segments of the population.

Regardless of where one lands on this particular controversy, robust skepticism and critical dissent are integral to scientific practice. This creates a genuine tightrope. A healthy research enterprise must encourage critical challenge; yet dissent can be selectively curated and amplified to overwhelm well-founded consensus or confuse the public.

“Science Under Siege” focuses on cases that are, for the most part, clear examples of orchestrated disinformation. That focus strengthens its immediate argument. Still, a more explicit acknowledgment of this boundary problem would illuminate an important area for future work: developing criteria and institutions that protect space for good-faith dissent without allowing every disagreement to become an opportunity for bad-faith actors to prolong or fabricate controversy.

Conclusion

Qualifications aside, “Science Under Siege” is a valuable contribution. It combines vivid narrative with a disciplined, structural account of how contemporary attacks on science operate. By mapping the reinforcing pressures that now confront climate and public health researchers, Mann and Hotez move the discussion beyond individual grievances to institutional diagnosis.

If the 20th century imagined science as an “Endless Frontier,” the 21st increasingly treats it as contested terrain. Until the multiple forces of attack identified in “Science Under Siege” are confronted, power will remain structurally positioned to overwhelm truth. Mann and Hotez’s contribution helps clarify what that confrontation requires and why it can no longer be deferred.