# The Republican War on Science Chris Mooney's 2005 book (Basic Books; revised 2006) arguing that the Republican Party of the Bush years had turned the distortion of science into a governing method — not the ordinary selective use of evidence every party practices, but a systematic effort, run through industry and the religious right, to manufacture doubt about findings that stood in the way of policy. Mooney was a young science journalist at the time; the book made him the chronicler of the pattern, and its title became a phrase the movement's targets adopted and its subjects resented. ## The argument Two coalitions, one method. Industry — tobacco first, then chemicals, then fossil fuels — funds research designed to create the appearance of controversy where the scientific community has none, and lobbies for "sound science" rules that raise the evidentiary bar for regulation ([[The Tobacco Strategy]], [[Merchants of Doubt]]). The religious right does the same on evolution, stem cells and reproductive health, with think tanks in place of laboratories. The Bush administration, Mooney argued, brought both inside the government: editing climate reports, stacking advisory committees, suppressing the Surgeon General, and treating the scientific consensus on climate as one view among several. Dozens of Nobel laureates and the Union of Concerned Scientists' 2004 statement on "scientific integrity" are his exhibits. The frame is the one the vault uses under [[Science Denial]]: the goal is not to win the argument but to keep it open. ## Reception and afterlife The book was attacked as one-sided — Democrats have their own science problems (nuclear power, GMOs, some vaccine politics), and Mooney's later work (*The Republican Brain*, 2012) was criticized for pathologizing disagreement. But the core account held up, and it looks in retrospect like a first edition: the doubt-manufacturing apparatus it described for climate went on to the [[Science Funding in America]] cuts, the [[Tuskegee and the Ethics of Human Experimentation]]-adjacent fights over public-health authority, and the second Trump term's replacement of advisory committees and the [[Bureau of Labor Statistics]] commissioner. The [[Reading Log Hub]] pairs it with *[[Merchants of Doubt]]* as the two case files; Philosophy of Science has the question the book does not answer, which is what "sound science" would actually require. [[Charles Darwin]], [[The Genomic Revolution]], [[The Green Revolution]] and [[The Space Race]] are the episodes the [[History of Science Hub]] uses to show what the relationship looked like before. ## See Also - [[Merchants of Doubt]] · [[The Tobacco Strategy]] · [[Science Denial]] · Philosophy of Science · [[Science Funding in America]] - [[Charles Darwin]] · [[Science and Religion in America]] · [[Bureau of Labor Statistics]] - [[Reading Log Hub]] · [[Science Hub]] · [[History of Science Hub]]