Discovery Institute is a religious right, Christian Nationalist think tank formed as an offshoot of the Hudson institute. They are dedicated to religious and business based anti-science doubt-sowing and undermining American institutes and policies seen by them as “socialist.”
They are most infamous for pimping “intelligent design,” a religious pseudo-science ideology designed to sow doubt about the Science of evolution by “wedging in” an alternative theory, that of intelligent design.
Remember how the Tobacco industry spent decades telling us that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer? When they could no longer sell that to the public, they switched to stating that “everything causes cancer.” That’s a statement both of my parents used to make when lighting up despite our objections that smoking would give them cancer, up until they both died of lung cancer.
Discovery uses the same strategy that big tobacco did, that of undermining the science and instilling just enough doubt to forestall consequences. They modified the strategy a bit, but it really hasn’t changed since the petroleum industry used it in the 1920’s to keep lead in gasoline among other things.
It was an attempt to get religion into the classroom, a way to protect the feelings of people who want to continue to believe that the world is only 6,000 years old when it’s very clearly and undeniably at least 4 billion years older than that. It was culture warring to undermine public consensus on science and education in our schools.
Their campaign has receded since those heady court room days of trying to wedge intelligent design and “teaching the [non-existent] controversy” into our school classrooms to subvert kid’s science education with religious claptrap.
However the religious right is indefatigable when it comes to chipping away at mainstream American institutions and science. Hudson/Discovery is insidious: even when soundly defeated they never stop, so the institute is still there and still spewing religion framed pseudo science to attack science. They are still out there sowing doubts about basic climate change, evolution, and medical science when it comes to gender and sex.
Discovery still exists, they still pimp intelligent design, and they are still tied to the Hudson Institute, the stink tank created by Herman Kahn, a Rand Corporation Alumni, and also that guy who was parodied in “Dr Strangelove”. But now they are also attacking Social Security, and sowing doubts about our financial institutions and programs that stabilized America in the post Depression world.
This means that conservative, anti-communist Christian America is still mounting their tried and true playbook against our Social Security. The most recent instance is from Nathan Lewis, here, but the institute’s leadership was still taking this approach 30 years ago, in 1996. Don’t be fooled now that you know who they are and how they work.
