This past week, Dr. Anthony Fauci was subpoenaed before Congress to answer for his handling of the COVID crisis, as well as the revelation of a diary he kept for his future book, emailed to himself on a government computer. The revelations have rocked the world, and even his supporters have decried him as an opportunistic liar.
The trend we’re seeing is that more and more, Americans trust scientists less as seekers of truth. The Enlightenment Age was really the rise of the scientist as the ultimate truth seeker, because before then, the clergy was the trusted source of truth. But when the clergy grew decadent and enriched themselves at the expense of truth, the people wholeheartedly turned away from the Church and toward science. Now, COVID has exposed that scientists themselves are just as corrupt as the clergy ever was, and young people in particular are turning to anecdotal experience of the world as their source of truth.
There are memes circulating about the failures of science, as well as entire storylines in popular media about the corporatization of the scientific community for profit, from The Torment Nexus and Resident Evil to Doom (2016), Mission Impossible II, and Oppenheimer.
Fauci entered the hearing after Sen. Rand Paul released more than 1,100 pages of his private diary entries. Those notes show early private openness to lab-related possibilities that clashed with some of his public statements, plus extensive personal focus on media attention, celebrity calls, and “Fauci-madness.”
Online reaction, especially on X, treated the Fifth Amendment performance as confirmation of long-standing distrust. High-engagement posts mocked the repeated “on the advice of counsel” line and circulated clips of senators calling the refusal self-incriminating.
Fauci is the most visible face, not the sole problem. Pew Research data show overall U.S. confidence that scientists act in the public interest remains at 77 percent, still well below the 87 percent recorded in April 2020. The drop has stabilized but has not reversed.
Commentary
Jonathan: The moment that diary landed on a government computer, it stopped being personal. It’s government property now.
We were yelled at for a long time to trust the science, even while we were saying the science didn’t make sense, because it wasn’t behaving the way science usually does. You can’t just yell “science” at me and make it science.
Thomas: Trusting science is a trend that has been growing for 300 years, and I suspect it has now started its terminal decline. That doesn’t mean people no longer trust science. It means roughly 10% fewer people trust it today than did in 2019.
Jonathan: It helps to remember when people started trusting science in the first place. In the Middle Ages, truth came to you through the clergy rather than through scientists, filtered through whatever religion you lived under, whether Catholic, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, or Islamic.
Thomas: Before Luther, the source of truth was authority. You agreed with the church, which was fused with the state, or you were burned at the stake. Truth was whatever the authority said it was.
When Luther nailed up his theses, that was the beginning of a shift from ethos to logos. Truth could now supersede authority and exist as its own thing. The Catholic Church went through the same transformation soon after, with the Jesuits arguing from facts and logic just as the Protestants did.
What has been growing since roughly the 1880s is the next shift, from logos to pathos, where feelings become the most important thing. In a debate now, people often don’t say “I think you’re wrong,” they say “You hurt my feelings.” That’s a pathos argument, not a logos one.
Jonathan: With the scientific community, though, it’s an ethos argument. We’re not hurting their feelings; we’re hurting their pride, because their whole posture is that they are the authority. The consensus is whatever they say it is, even when it isn’t the consensus.
In the Enlightenment, scientists were the ones speaking against the church. The Earth is not the center of the universe. Truth moved out from under the clergy to independent investigators, and science reigned for several hundred years.
Thomas: Fauci’s abuse of authority didn’t even start with COVID. People pin an earlier version of it on him from the AIDS crisis, though I’m not up on those details.
Jonathan: I’d want to do a lot more research before saying anything on the AIDS claim.
Thomas: On COVID, though, the reason he shut down questions about gain-of-function research is that the questions don’t stop. The first one is why anyone is trying to make a super-virus deadlier. The next is who paid for it, and the answer is Americans. Then, why are Americans funding Chinese labs to build super-viruses? Then, who approved that money? Fauci.
No wonder he pleaded the Fifth 100 times. He created the virus he profited off of. That’s the plot of half the evil-scientist movies of the ’90s, all in one man. And we wonder why young people don’t trust scientists anymore.
Jonathan: We successfully built the Torment Nexus, from the famous novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.
If materialism functions as a cultural religion, scientists have long served as its priesthood. A generation ago that priesthood carried moral weight. Young readers now watch high-profile figures protect themselves, shift guidance, and, in Fauci’s case, write diary entries that mix death counts with notes about bobbleheads and beers named after him.
The result is simple: a materialistic scientist who declares “there is no such thing as ghosts” carries less automatic authority than the same claim did 20 years ago. Trust metrics from Annenberg and UK surveys show measurable softening in perceptions of competence and trustworthiness.
Thomas: When Fauci said “Don’t question the science,” that was the most anti-science statement he could make, because he was presenting himself as a priest of a religion. By materialism I don’t mean buying plastic stuff. I mean the belief that the material world is all there is, that there are no ghosts, no witches, no vampires. That religion has scientists as its priests.
Science itself is different from scientists. Science is a way of asking good questions and reaching answers that other people can test by asking the same question and seeing if they get the same result, for the betterment of humanity. So when Fauci said “I am the science, don’t question the science,” he set himself up as a high priest of a false religion, and real scientists were offended. There was a schism, with scientists angry that he was using the power of the state to suppress dissent.
It didn’t start with him, either. It started with climate change, because “the science is settled” is also an anti-science statement. Even relativity isn’t settled. You can have something treated as settled for 100 years that turns out not to be accurate. The best phrase in science is “Hmm, that’s weird.” When a scientist says that, or says he thinks all the other scientists are wrong, he’s on the verge of either a breakthrough or crackpottery. Either way, you don’t burn him at the stake.
Jonathan: Look at the incentive structure too. When science started, it was men who wanted truth, and they didn’t get rich doing it. Now the money is in pharmaceuticals and consumer products. When you build a vaccine that can be made mandatory, the way the flu shot was, that’s guaranteed sales. So you’re right to ask whether someone has your best interest in mind when they need to keep selling you a shot every single year.
Thomas: Science earned its authority with a genuinely great run in the 20th century. Penicillin alone gave the medical community enormous credibility, a near-magical cure that beat back diseases that used to kill people. Every few years the scientists would emerge from the temple with another breakthrough that made life better.
Then some of the breakthroughs started making life worse. The hairspray of the ’80s put a hole in the ozone layer. Leaded gasoline turned out to be poison that made people stupid. What mattered is how science handled it. It self-corrected. “Sorry, our bad, we’ll take the lead out.”
It did not say, “There is no hole in the ozone layer. Leaded gasoline is safe. The science is settled, and anyone who disagrees gets shunned.” Because the science had been settled that leaded gasoline was safe, and the science was wrong. Stated plainly, breathing lead is bad for you, and that’s obvious. They just kept adding words to it until this lead was the safe lead and that lead was the bad lead.
Jonathan: You know who really doesn’t trust scientists? Military members. We can be ordered to take the shot, and I have been ordered to take the shot, and we always got sick, and it wasn’t the flu.
Thomas: Fast-forward to 2020, and that’s what caused the big drop. The vaccine was declared safe and effective, and the two promises were that you wouldn’t get COVID and you wouldn’t spread it. Neither turned out to be true. The numbers kept quietly sliding downward.
People got the shot, got sick, told themselves it was worth it because at least they wouldn’t get COVID, and then they got COVID anyway. For a lot of them, that broke something. They had trusted the priesthood, the shot made billions of dollars, and it didn’t do what was promised.
Now “you sound vaccinated” is an insult among young people, right alongside being called an NPC, a non-player character just following the programming.
Jonathan: And if you were discharged for refusing the shot, you’re a bit of a hero now. It comes with clout.
Thomas: What science actually needs, to fend off the postmodernists who just say “well, that’s your truth,” is credibility, and credibility comes from being right. You can’t argue a postmodernist out of the belief that a crystal cured his COVID. You can’t hand him six studies, because he’ll say the studies are your truth. What you can do is say, “You’re sick, and I have a fix.” That fix can walk him back toward materialism, the same way someone who deconstructed after the shot reconstructs the moment penicillin saves him.
I say this as a supernaturalist and a Christian. I believe in science. I’m just a step removed, because I’m not a materialist.
Jonathan: I believe in truth. The first scientists were right to seek truth over authority, and that search is what has to stay at the front of everything. “The science is settled” is not a truth statement; it’s an authority statement. It asks me to take it on faith without letting me verify the process, when verifying and duplicating the process is the whole thing science claims to offer.
Thomas: Speaking truth to an angry mob doesn’t defuse it, and there’s a growing mob of postmodernists whose worldview ends in nihilism, which wants to burn everything down. Strange as it sounds, the materialists and the modernists are the ones holding civilization up against that mob. And civilization does burn down on a cycle. We lost whole books of Titus Livy because one rotting manuscript never got recopied. Knowledge doesn’t persist on its own; it has to be defended, the way a city has to defend its last few water fountains instead of tearing them out.
The classic “fedora guy” of the 2010s—the neckbeard tipping his hat while declaring himself “euphoric” and enlightened by pure science—has become a punchline. New Atheism’s aggressive cultural moment has collapsed. Multiple recent surveys show Gen Z is less likely than older cohorts to identify as hard atheists and more open to spirituality, paranormal possibilities, or simply “spiritual but not religious.”
UK data in particular show sharp drops in young people claiming no belief in any greater power, while belief in God and self-described spirituality have risen. The once-edgy claim that science had rendered the supernatural ridiculous no longer feels cutting-edge. It feels dated.
For a long time, the settled view was that witches aren’t real, so you shouldn’t burn them. Early on, people believed witches had real power and had to be killed to stop the hexing. Then scientists said the witches aren’t real. Now people are circling back to “but maybe they are.”
Jonathan: There’s this growing fascination with what the ancients knew that we don’t. A guy named Josh from England toured the United States, went into the Appalachians, and asked, “Do you hear whistling in the woods? I’m going to go check that out.” The whole comment thread said, “No, Josh. Get out of the woods.” The people up there and whatever lives in those woods have kept an understanding for a very long time, and maybe we shouldn’t break the treaty.
Thomas: The mistake was going after this online in the wrong order. The first people persecuted on the internet weren’t the anti-vaxxers; they were the flat-earthers, and that was a serious error. Flat-earthers already have a conspiratorial mindset that the world is out to get them. The worst thing you can do to someone in that frame is start validating it, because then he becomes certain he was right. Meanwhile, any radar technician running a missile battery will tell you the curvature of the earth is extremely real.
Jonathan: When you already think everyone’s after you because you’re right, and then everyone actually comes after you, you take it as confirmation.
Thomas: Boomers are genuinely shocked at how much their kids and grandkids believe in magic, in curses, in vampires and ghosts and demons and werewolves and skinwalkers. They’ll say, “No, this is a scientific world, it’s all clockwork, it’s all determined.” And the younger person says, “I check my horoscope every day.” Look at the numbers on how many young people believe in it and practice it.
The Joe Rogan Counterweight
Into that vacuum stepped Joe Rogan. For years, the most influential podcaster in the English-speaking world has treated Bigfoot, aliens, interdimensional beings, demons, and related phenomena as topics worth serious conversation rather than automatic dismissal. He platforms researchers, experiencers, and theorists who explore these subjects without the old materialist sneer.
Rogan’s openness functions as a cultural counterweight. Millions of listeners, especially younger men, hear a mainstream voice treat the unexplained as interesting instead of embarrassing. When the scientific priesthood looks compromised, and the fedora atheist looks cringe, Rogan’s posture normalizes curiosity about the supernatural. That shift in permission structure reaches far beyond any single episode.
Readers who no longer treat materialist certainty as unassailable show greater appetite for stories that leave room for the unseen. Circana BookScan data track sustained strength in romantasy, dark fantasy, and horror. The supernatural/horror subcategory was one of the few YA fiction areas to post gains even as overall YA units softened.
Authors now operate in a market where longing for meaning beyond the purely physical is commercially viable again. Ghosts, angels, ancient powers, and unexplained forces no longer require the same defensive framing they once did. The cultural permission structure has shifted.
Commentary
Thomas: Here’s the tell. People will still say on a survey that they trust science, but when they sit down with a book, they’re longing for a supernatural flavor.
True science fiction is now vanishingly rare. A lot of what’s labeled science fiction is just the same conflicts we have here, moved into space. Heinlein was a scientist. Asimov was a legitimate, published scientist who also wrote fiction. That combination was the glory of 20th-century science fiction, and it’s mostly gone. The closest thing today is engineers, like Andy Weir.
There’s a real argument that science died a while ago and engineering replaced it. That’s Elon Musk’s view. He doesn’t believe in science; he believes in engineering, and he’s effectively replaced NASA by betting his engineers can reach Mars first. Engineering and medicine are almost the humbler, less corrupted denominations of the same materialist religion.
This opens an opportunity, because demand has moved. The 20th-century reader subscribed to Popular Mechanics and was curious about the science. Today’s reader wants the magic.
Take almost any genre and add magic, and you have a breakout. A smoky detective noir where the detective is a wizard is the Dresden Files. School plus magic is Harry Potter, or Percy Jackson, or Twilight. War plus magic or politics plus magic is Brandon Sanderson and George R. R. Martin.
Invert it, genre plus science, and it mostly declines. Mystery plus science was forensics, Sherlock Holmes, CSI, and CSI now pulls a fraction of the ratings it had 20 years ago. Horror plus science was huge in the 20th century. Horror plus magic is huge now. Space opera was always magic anyway. Star Wars is knights and wizards in space.
Jonathan: Even the science fiction people love is really magic with science layered on. Project Hail Mary runs on space dots that have no scientific explanation; they just hold enormous energy, and the science gets painted on over that.
Thomas: Project Hail Mary is the exception that proves the rule, and even there it’s engineering, not science. Same with The Martian. There’s no actual science in that science fiction; it’s an engineer solving problems.
If a materialist still wants to write that pro-science story for a modern audience, the model is Brandon Sanderson. His magic is so rigorous it’s basically science, and he almost always has a character learning the magic system by the scientific method. He may be quietly deconstructing postmodernism and pulling readers back toward modernism the whole time.
Jonathan: The magic never breaks the rules of his world. It is the rules of his world.
There’s something related happening with AI. Scientists have found that when they just let an AI run, it comes apart, because it has no body. You need the limits of a body to hold your perception of the world in place. That’s why an AI hallucinates so freely. It has no boundaries, so it will tell you it can fly, and nothing in its experience can disprove it. It will cheerfully tell you to jump off the roof, because it has never had a body with anything at stake. Scientists built a thing that can’t actually use science.
Thomas: Here’s a clean example of the shift. C.S. Lewis’s most controversial book when he wrote it is now his least controversial. The Screwtape Letters was scandalous in 1940 because he dared to treat devils as real. For a sitting Oxford professor to say demons existed was so shocking it put him on the cover of Time. Now it’s just part of the Western canon, quoted comfortably even by people who aren’t Christian.
What’s controversial now is the moral argument in Mere Christianity. His claims about men and women having different roles, and about homosexuality, weren’t controversial at the time and would get him canceled today. The tide has reversed. 20th-century readers wanted the materialist world to be true. 21st-century readers want the supernatural one, because they want the ghosts to be real and something to be out there in those Appalachian woods.
Thomas: There’s even a book-burning in the Bible, and it isn’t treated with contempt. The question worth asking is whether they burned those magic books because they were fake or because something in them was real and dangerous.
Jonathan: People argue every side of that. Pharaoh’s magicians, the Witch of Endor, Balaam. The 20th-century instinct was to grab the most materialist reading available, that it was all smoke and mirrors and a snake up a sleeve.
Thomas: And how much of that are you reading in because you want the materialist world to exist? The materialist frame we adopted last century is the historical abnormality. Every ancient culture believed in a world of wonder, of fairies and ghosts and demons. The uncanny valley exists for a reason. Our ancestors found it useful to feel dread around something that looks human and isn’t.
Jonathan: Think about who’s reading. People spend eight or nine hours a day at a job they hate, then come to a book hoping for something they enjoy. The stories they love most are about someone like them dropped into a fantastical world who still has to obey its dumb rules. The character walks up to the magical DMV and gets told, “Yep, the moon’s haunted,” and just has to deal with it.
Thomas: That’s why Larry Correia works so well. Monsters are real, so grab a shotgun and go hunt them, and there’s good money in it.
Jonathan: The thing to actually do is combine truth and wonder. Go to the Bible, study how it’s built, and craft your world the same way. Create a perfect world, then introduce conflict.
Thomas: And if you bring wonder to your reading of the Bible, it gets far more interesting. If the first commandment forbids other gods not because they’re fake but because they’re dangerous, the whole Old Testament opens up. That materialist frame is only a few minutes old, historically.
Jonathan: There’s an old line. Hard times make good men. The giants, the monsters, and the demons made good men, and the good men wiped them out. Then easy times make weak men, and when the men are weak, the giants and the monsters and the demons come back.
The high priests of pure materialism have spent years looking fallible, self-protective, and sometimes self-regarding. Young readers noticed. The fedora lost its magic. Joe Rogan opened the door wider. And the stories that once felt like guilty pleasures now feel like the natural response to a world that no longer trusts its own experts to close every door.
Sources
Pew Research Center: Americans’ confidence in scientists (January 2026)
Annenberg Public Policy Center analyses of scientists’ credibility
Senate hearing coverage and Fauci Fifth Amendment reports (AP, NYT, CNN, July 29–30 2026)
Rand Paul diary release and contemporaneous reporting (Fox, CNN, Atlantic, July 2026)
UK and Gen Z spirituality/atheism surveys (YouGov, OnePoll, Bible Society reporting 2025)
Circana BookScan and Publishers Weekly sales data on romantasy, fantasy, and supernatural categories
Gallup and YouGov paranormal belief polls
Joe Rogan Experience episodes and clips discussing Bigfoot, UAPs/aliens, interdimensional beings, and demonic interpretations (multiple guests including recent conversations with JD Vance, Diana Pasulka, and others)
