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Ideology, taken to extremes, tends to reject observed truths. Thus, American leftists, with monopoly control of major urban areas and academia, preside over spikes in homicides, open drug use, homelessness, and ridiculous historical fabulism. Many of the elite claim with straight faces that there are 81 genders while simultaneously staking a sacred belief in “science.”
Such willful insanity has been seen before, in other places. Starting in the 1930s and continuing for two decades, Stalin’s Soviet Union imposed the theories of biologist Trofim Lysenko on the nation. Under Lysenko, genetics was sneered at as “bourgeois science,” “fascist,” and even “Jewish.” To create the New Soviet Man, science had to be rebuilt on the foundation of dialectical materialism, rejecting the idea that humans had a certain nature that could only be evolved over long periods of time through Darwinian random selection.
This, of course, led to the executions and imprisonment of thousands of actual scientists. A rejection of science meant wasting limited resources trying to grow crops under poor conditions. And Lysenko’s beliefs also contributed to famine that killed up to 6 million people.
Lysenkoism has come to mean the purposeful bending of science in service of ideology.
In self-correcting societies, the trend toward Lysenkoism can be checked. Elections have consequences. Thus, in America, some elected officials who pushed harsh lockdowns in response to Covid-19, or who allow biological males to compete against females, or who promote criminal justice practices that erode public safety, have found themselves out of office.
But in dictatorial nations, such as the old Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China, Lysenkoism can have free range — with disastrous consequences.Anti-Science Lysenkoism in China
The danger signs in China have been there for years.
It’s well-known that paramount leader Xi Jinping, China’s first leader to hold a doctorate degree, plagiarized his doctoral thesis — and even likely had someone else write it for him.