Science holds its practitioners up to standards and sometimes finds them wanting. If we didn't have scandals then that would be alarming. For many, many years t

Science holds its practitioners up to standards and sometimes finds them wanting. If we didn't have scandals then that would be alarming. For many, many years there were no sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church. In retrospect, was that a good sign? I don't see any sign of scientists being placed on pedestals in the US. What I see in the US is rampant anti-intellectualism, a cynicism about intellectual rigor, and cherry picking findings because they agree with ideological preconceptions. We're all guilty of it to some extent, but there are now a significant number of Americans who simply will not listen to well-reasoned argument.