Elected MAGAs, including their king, belittle science, disparage scientists, health care workers, and professors, and publicly question the very medicine they run to when they get sick. Knowledge is for wimps, until they need it.

When the Mad King was stricken by COVID-19, he was rushed, via helicopter, to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The hospital is 9 miles from the White House. The non-mask-wearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci-bashing fake tough guy received care out of reach for the vast majority of Americans. He wasn’t given a livestock dewormer. He didn’t drink bleach or swallow light. He didn’t guzzle hydroxychloroquine.

The Mad King received care, dispensed by professionals, based on science and expertise — everything he discredited before and after he got COVID. He downplayed the pandemic’s severity and its risks while pushing quack remedies he didn’t receive.

“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,” Capt. Bone Spurs wrote on social media a few hours before being released from one of the best military hospitals in the country.

He and his disgusting ilk know they will receive top-notch care, so they have no qualms telling their supports lies they know could sicken or kill them. They think an iron lung sounds cool.

Robert Kennedy Jr., the two-faced secretary of Health and Human Services, tells senators his children were vaccinated and that “vaccines have a critical role in health care.”

MAGA supporters don’t watch C-SPAN or read anything critical of the regime, so Kennedy continues to go on Fox Propaganda to spew anti-vax views and tout cod liver oil as a measles cure.

The regime’s gutted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning a study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, a favorite Kennedy conspiracy. Ignore all the previous studies and research that have found no link.

This science-bashing charade is putting people and the natural world in danger.

The regime is planning to cancel its lease at a government laboratory in Hawaii, a site where scientists track rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. The potential closure of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development would undermine the agency’s ability to protect public health and wildlife. The plan is to eliminate the EPA’s scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists.

The Department of Defense is ending funding for social science research, halting some 90 ongoing studies related to threats such as climate change, extremism, and disinformation.

The regime has terminated millions of dollars in research awards to scientists in Massachusetts and across the country, citing Mad King restrictions on funding anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, transgender issues, or research that could potentially benefit universities in China.

The whims of a narcissist don’t lead to good policy. It’s certainly not leadership.

The Mad King has fired hundreds of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers and scientists. He wants to eviscerate the EPA staff by 65%. Policymakers, at both the state and federal level, rely on rigorous, peer-reviewed research from the EPA and NOAA to safeguard the environment.

His public contempt for federal employees and their expertise has forced at least one high-ranking National Aeronautics and Space Administration official to warn his employees to “use discretion” when displaying badges or emblems that identify them as federal workers, to avoid potential harassment.

MAGAs with Ivy League degrees, such as the vice president, call others with an education elite.

They want their supporters ignorant, so they’ll gobble up all the MAGA lies and merch without question.

The regime’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, the former CEO of a fracking company with no government experience, has said methane — a potent greenhouse gas rebranded as natural gas — was preferable to renewable energy and that climate change was a “side effect of building the modern world.”

The burning of fossil fuels has ignited global heating that is simultaneously burning and flooding the planet, spreading disease, creating climate refugees, and causing a sixth mass extinction. Wright is OK with all that as long as he and his buddies get rich. No possible alternatives should be studied or used, unless MAGA makes a profit.

Wright has an estimated net worth of about $170 million.

The Mad King wants to circumvent environmental regulations to expand timber production, dismissing harm to the climate and environment and ignoring the potential to worsen wildfire risk.

Two MAGA bills in Congress would prohibit the EPA from scientific research on chemical toxicity. The regime and industry lobbyists don’t want the agency to measure the threat of toxic chemicals.

The legislation would prohibit the EPA from using any of hundreds of chemical assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions, and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water. The agency would also be forbidden from using this information to map the health risks from toxic chemicals.

Less than 5% of the 350,000 chemicals and mixtures registered for production and use have been tested for safety. Never mind how all these chemicals unleashed with little thought interact with each other under the sun and in the ocean.

Five percent is still too much for the Mad King and his minions, until some of that poison hits too close to their gated communities. That’s the MAGA way. Let others pay for their irresponsibility.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.