Chapter 8: The War on Knowledge

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In the summer of 2016, I went to testify before the Michigan State Board of Education about my son. What I didn’t expect were the buses—hundreds of protesters bused in from churches across the state, ready to testify that what they were witnessing was satanic abuse and the grooming of children. The conflict in that room was not really about transgender students. It was about epistemology: who gets to decide what counts as evidence, and whose evidence counts.

This episode is about the war on knowledge—a coordinated, well-funded, sustained assault on the institutions and practices through which a society honestly figures out what is true. The attack on public education is not incidental to Christian nationalism. It is central to it. I trace the line from the segregation academies that followed Brown v. Board, through the record-breaking surge in book bans documented by PEN America, to my own hometown of Dexter, Michigan, where a planned reading of I Am Jazz became a flashpoint.

And here’s the thing I most want you to see: manufactured doubt and manufactured certainty are the same weapon wearing different costumes. One says the answer is clear and it’s God. The other says the answer is unclear and the experts can’t agree. Same goal—to keep honest critical thinking from ever reaching the evidence. Oreskes and Conway documented the playbook in Merchants of Doubt; the attacks on the evidence base for gender-affirming care follow it exactly.

From an engineering perspective, the long-term consequences are terrifying. Societies that suppress the honest production of knowledge don’t become more orderly—they become less capable of managing the problems they face. When manufactured certainty overrides knowledge, people die. That’s not a metaphor. But people are also fighting back, and a lot of the bravest resistance is coming from the students themselves.