The Right-Wing War on Knowledge

From research on guns to the study of gender-affirming care to books themselves, conservatives want to shut down the pursuit of knowledge.

Photo by matthew Feeney on Unsplash

The list of research and knowledge-gaining efforts that Republicans have tanked seems to get longer by the day. For a quarter-century, Republicans in Congress blocked research into gun violence. At the state level, they’ve blocked or attempted to block research on human sexuality, and have long opposed teaching medically-accurate information about human reproduction and human evolution in public schools. Debates are currently raging over what kind of stories and scientifically-accurate information students can access not just in their classrooms but in their libraries, as conservative activists push to ban book and re-write American history. As conservative legislatures ban or curtail gender-affirming care for minors on the grounds that we simply don’t have enough research or information to justify allowing this case to be “tested” on children, they also make it impossible to fully research gender-affirming care in order to gather the very information they claim to need.

Conservatism is, by definition and by historical practice, hostile to change, and change is often spurred by exposure to new information. There’s a reason that Eve eating the apple — sinning by pursuing knowledge — is the founding myth of Christianity. There’s a reason that the anti-Enlightenment forebears to today’s Christian right censored Copernicus and targeted Galileo in the Inquisition. Knowledge begets progress. Progress means change — often to old power structures.

If there is one through-line in today’s increasingly incoherent Republican Party, it is the unvarnished pursuit of power. Yes, the GOP still pulls in the Christian right, but it’s hard to take their Christianity seriously when they back a serial philanderer, cheater, and accused rapist for the presidency. Yes, the GOP still pulls in the libertarian right, but it’s hard to take any claims of libertarianism seriously when they want to interfere with the healthcare parents can allow their children to access, when they expand government reach to suit their aims, when they seek to curtail speech they dislike, and when they demand the government get all the way up into your uterus. What is the Republican agenda? We don’t know, exactly, because they didn’t publish a party platform in the last presidential election.

What is clear is that today’s GOP is concerned with exerting dominance: Owning the libs, humiliating immigrants, demeaning gay and trans people, putting women back in our place. And the GOP is concerned with maintaining a grip on power at all costs — no matter if the person who wields it threatens American democracy, sows toxic doubt about American elections, or makes clear that they share common ground with white supremacists.

For all the Republican talk of protecting children and focusing on the family, their real concern is power. And the less access to information the public has, the easier the public is to manipulate and control.

Take the debate over trans healthcare.