I'm not going to "do" Columbus this year. I think people are coming around to the consensus that he is not a person who should have statues or a day in his honor. I'll just outsource to Adam Conover

That taken care of, I commend your attention to this interview by Scientific American with Peter Hotez, who is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, on the authoritarian roots of science denial. Best you read the whole thing, but here's a pull quote.

People call [the antiscience movement] “misinformation” or “the infodemic” as though it’s just random junk out there on the Internet or social media, and it’s not—it’s organized, it’s well-financed, and it’s politically motivated. It’s really its own ecosystem that’s doing a lot of damage to the country and to American science and scientists. And now it’s reached a new level. It’s become a lethal force. It’s the fact that [at least] 200,000 Americans needlessly perished [between June 2021 and March 2022] because they refused the COVID vaccine during the [Delta and Omicron COVID waves], and they were victims of this organized campaign.

 

So why is this happening? What's the motive, other than the obvious one of money?

This is coming out of the authoritarian playbook, with devastating consequences. We’re seeing it not only in the U.S. but also in Brazil with [former president Jair Bolsonaro’s] regime or with [Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán in Hungary. This is part of how authoritarian regimes operate: you denigrate science and scientists.

 

Authoritarian leaders don't want alternate sources of legitimacy, and they don't want effective arbiters of truth. They want to be able to lie with impunity, and science is, fundamentally, a commitment to truth. I'll have more to say about this.