Above, PhD immunologist weighs in on the Fauci hearings and long term damage MAGA has wrought on American science.
Below, Paul Krugman:
What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.
But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.
If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there.
They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.
Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things?
As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.
George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:
In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.
Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:
If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.
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Which brings me to this yo-yo.
What a surprise that one of the internet’s primary “influencers” against clean energy is a MAGA nut job!
Writing on Heated, Alex Hannaford did a nice dissection of Alexandra Fasulo, who does viral videos posing as a defender of the land from Upstate New York, but turns out to be just another climate-denying, J-6er defending, anti-vax conspiracist quack.
Before becoming an anti-solar influencer, Fasulo was a self-identified MAGA Republican who expressed fierce loyalty to Donald Trump, and conspiratorial views on everything from the COVID vaccine to the 2020 election.
On a since-deleted Twitter account, Fasulo cheered the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol. She referenced Q, the anonymous figurehead of the QAnon conspiracy theory. She posted about The Great Reset, a conspiracy that claims the coronavirus was an excuse to dismantle capitalism. She falsely claimed that the most violent insurrectionists were secretly members of antifa, and that the COVID-19 vaccine used nanoparticles to alter human DNA.
When HEATED asked Fasulo about those posts, she dismissed the relevance.
“I just think that has nothing to do with this current solar battle,” she said. “It’s like if we brought up your diary from when you were 18.”
These posts matter, however, because they show a longstanding conspiratorial way of interpreting the world. That same logic now runs through Fasulo’s solar campaign.
“My belief is when some people very, very pompously hold their science above other people’s science, I say to them, there’s actually no way of knowing if yours is the right science,” she told me.
When I said that I had spoken with a scientist who disputed her claim that solar panels could poison the environment with lead, Fasulo suggested that he must be paid by the renewable energy industry. (There is no evidence that he is; Mulvaney’s disclosed research funding comes primarily from government and institutional sources. He is also known for helping create the Solar Scorecard, which scrutinizes photovoltaic manufacturers’ sustainability practices).
“Every single scientist is bought in this country,” she said. “Every single scientist has an agenda.”
This creates a self-sealing argument. No scientific evidence can disprove Fasulo’s claims, because any scientist who disagrees can simply be declared corrupt.
Fasulo recently liked a comment on her Substack portraying climate change as a lie and a conspiracy. She told HEATED that she is not a climate denier.
She does not necessarily need to be one. Climate change can remain nominally real in Fasulo’s worldview, so long as the scientists studying it cannot be trusted, the environmental groups responding to it are compromised, and the technologies proposed to address it are more dangerous than fossil fuels.
In a Facebook Reel last October, Fasulo denounced ORES and Boralex while displaying the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of employees.
“I refuse to allow these people to live in the dark and do what they do anymore,” she said.
When Fasulo posted a photograph of former ORES executive director Zeryai Hagos, one person wrote, “Where’s our Luigi?”—an apparent reference to Luigi Mangione, the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. On TikTok, another commenter wrote, “Sounds like a case for Luigi 💯.”
A former ORES employee told HEATED that a staff member had been threatened with hanging. Nathan Stone, an independent media consultant who until recently worked in communications for ORES, said the threats became severe enough that state police had to be involved.
The pattern is not limited to ORES. In July 2025, Outdoor Life documented a clash between Fasulo and Alabama-based conservationist Kyle Lybarger, who had publicly challenged misinformation in her posts. A surge of harassment from Fasulo’s audience, including credible death threats, eventually forced Lybarger to scrub all mention of her from his digital platforms.
Asked about the threats, Fasulo denied responsibility. “I can’t possibly see what all two million people are doing on the Internet,” she told HEATED. “I have never once posted anything that calls for physical violent interactions.”
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Common thread here, from Upstate New York to my home state of Michigan, and across the country, is that propensity of anti-clean energy types to make death threats to anyone that contradicts them. See my interviews with local officials here.