New Handbook Aims to Protect Scientists From Autocratic Threats

By By Bob Berwyn Lauren Dalban

As autocratic regimes around the world increasingly step up attacks on scientists and academic freedom, a team of researchers has published a new anti-autocracy handbook to help scientists protect their personal safety and their work.

In the United States, authoritarian shadows loom over the Independence Day holiday, cast by an administration that is violating the U.S. Constitution, said lead author Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol, who researches why people reject well-established scientific facts, such as climate change or the effectiveness of vaccinations.

While the handbook was written with scientists in mind, it also includes useful information for a broader audience, Lewandowsky said, warning that scientists and science are likely not the only targets in autocratic regimes.

“They’ll go after journalists,” he said. “They’ll go after judges. They’re already doing that unless they’re compliant. They’ll go after anything or anyone that can provide accountability or an alternative to this emerging tyranny. This isn’t a joke or a blip and this isn’t normal. This is a concerted, programmatic effort to abolish democracy in the United States.”

Along with giving scientists tools to protect themselves, the new handbook also provides guidance for organizing the science community to improve institutional resistance to autocratic measures, said Ed Maibach, a climate change communications researcher at George Mason University who was not involved in the handbook’s creation.

“I’m confident that many scientists and scholars are willing to stand up for democracy, but in the U.S., we’ve taken it for granted,” he said. “Now, as a community, we need to get involved to protect democracy, the system of government in which science, health and humanity are most likely to thrive.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said the handbook is an important addition to the discourse about how society can best address existential threats like the climate crisis.

“In my view, there is no path to meaningful climate action that doesn’t go through a functioning American democracy, and that is clearly under threat,” Mann, who was not among the handbook’s authors, said via email. “I’d like to say happy 4th but we can’t really say that in good conscience anymore.”

The new handbook is a timely resource “given the unprecedented assault on American science, academia, scientists and truth by the Trump administration, Republican Congress, and an increasingly politicized Supreme Court,” water and climate researcher Peter Gleick, with the Pacific Institute, wrote via email. “It offers clear descriptions of the kinds of threats and authoritarian tactics we now face. More importantly, it offers options and strategies for pushing back, depending on if the threats one personally faces are low, medium or high.”

Gleick said the handbook also includes good suggestions for helping both scientists and nonscientists advocate for science by engaging with the media and elected officials, as well as how to reach out to younger generations and students. And it’s accompanied by an interactive Wiki, where people can share stories, warnings and advice.

There are also instructions for hands-on “protection of research and data at risk of being corrupted or canceled, and ultimately, how to throw sand in the gears of accelerating authoritarianism and fascism,” he said.

To make sure scientists and others can accurately identify threats, the Wiki includes a section called “Authoritarianism: How You Know It When You See It.” It defines authoritarianism this way: “The concentration of power in the hands of a small group of people who act in ways that are not constitutionally accountable to the people they are meant to represent and serve.”

Core hallmarks of autocrats include rejecting democratic rules, denying the legitimacy of opponents, tolerating or encouraging political violence, curtailing opponents’ civil liberties and breaking down social cohesion to divide and rule a society, according to the handbook.

Lewandowsky, the lead author, said the integrity of science is important because it represents the closest thing society has to an objective truth. But an authoritarian leader, he added, seeks to undermine the very notion of truth and any institution that stands for it as part of a “programmatic effort to replace accountability with just him doing what he wants.” That’s what President Donald Trump is doing now, he added.

Asked for comment, the White House replied that “all of the authors of this ‘handbook’ that graduated from an American university donate to ActBlue and Democrat presidential candidates.” ActBlue is a Democratic fundraising platform that Trump directed his attorney general in April to investigate.

“Democrat donors should keep their journal entries about their disdain for President Trump to their diaries,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement.

The handbook has 19 co-authors, including scientists and other experts from the U.S., Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico.

For anyone who thinks the scientists’ concerns are overblown,Lewandowsky noted that the White House has already ignored some court orders, a huge warning sign of a slide toward authoritarianism. And people should not shy away from comparisons with fascism in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, he added.

“I think we’re past the point where we should be embarrassed by that,” he said. “I think it’s bizarre not to think of those analogies, because they’re so incredibly obvious. They’re now opening up concentration camps in the Everglades where they put people in cages for no reason at all other than that somebody has determined that they’re undesirables.”

He said that could happen to anybody.

“They could be citizens. There’s no due process. You can get snatched off the street, sent to a torture prison in El Salvador or to a concentration camp in the Everglades. I mean, if that isn’t fascism, I don’t know what is.”

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