Chapter 8: The War on Knowledge
In the summer of 2016, the Michigan State Board of Education met to consider voluntary guidance on how schools could support LGBTQ students. The room was packed. Supportive parents, educators, and allies were ready to testify with care and specificity. I was there to testify about my son.
What we did not expect were the buses. Conservative community leaders had organized hundreds of protesters to fill the meeting room, bused in from churches across the state, ready to testify that what they were witnessing was satanic abuse, sexual deviance, and the grooming of children. Medical evidence was irrelevant to them. Legal protections were irrelevant. The only authority that mattered was their interpretation of Scripture. The Board eventually adopted the guidance. But the dynamics of that room—the volume, the certainty, the willingness to override expert testimony with religious conviction—told me something important about the nature of the conflict we are in.
The conflict is not, in the end, about transgender students—and naming that matters. It is about epistemology. It is about who gets to decide what counts as evidence and whose evidence counts. The people who showed up to that board meeting were not primarily motivated by animus toward transgender students, though some were. They were primarily motivated by the belief that their religious understanding of gender had a legitimate claim on the public institutions of a pluralistic community. And that belief is the thing I am arguing against.
Public institutions in a pluralistic democracy serve people with different religious beliefs, different cultural backgrounds, and different moral frameworks. The justification for the authority of those institutions has to be accessible to all of them. Grounded in evidence that anyone, regardless of religious background, can evaluate. “God says so” is a legitimate reason for a private religious community to organize its own practices. It is not a legitimate reason for a public school to implement a policy that affects students of every faith and no faith.
And the specific question before that board was not even a religious question. It was an empirical one. What policies produce better outcomes for transgender students? That question has an answer, and the answer is in the clinical literature. Policies that affirm transgender students’ identities are associated with better mental health, lower rates of depression and anxiety, reduced risk of suicidality. The people opposing the guidance were not engaging with that evidence. They were asserting a competing authority and claiming it should override the evidence in the governance of a public institution.
The historian Diane Ravitch spent decades studying the politics of American education, and she documented how the culture wars of the twentieth century repeatedly used public schools as the terrain on which conflicts about values and authority were fought out—and how the students were always the ones who paid the price. The specific battles changed. Prayer in schools. Evolution. Sex education. Critical race theory. But the structure of the conflict was consistent. A religiously motivated movement claiming the authority to override expert consensus in the governance of institutions designed to serve the public as a whole.
This episode is about the war on knowledge. Because that’s what it is. A coordinated, well-funded, sustained war on the institutions and practices through which a society honestly figures out what is true.
The attack on public education is not incidental to the broader project of Christian nationalism. It is central to it. The ultimate goal—and the movement’s leaders have been remarkably candid about this—is the elimination of public education as we know it, and its replacement by a privately and church-run educational system in which children are taught a version of history, science, and social reality shaped by evangelical Christian doctrine.
This is not new. The evangelical Christian school movement that exploded after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was not primarily motivated by religious conviction. As the historian Randall Balmer has meticulously documented, it was motivated by the desire to maintain racially segregated education after the Supreme Court ruled against it. The religious framing came later, as legal cover for what was fundamentally a resistance to integration.
Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Moral Majority, was explicit about this in private. The movement’s political strategy was to mobilize white evangelical voters using the language of religious freedom to advance an agenda that was fundamentally about racial and social hierarchy.
The current wave of book bans and curricular restrictions is continuous with that history. PEN America’s 2023 report documented the largest surge in school book bans in American history. The vast majority of banned books address LGBTQ identities, Black history, or both. Moms for Liberty, one of the principal organizations driving the bans, has been classified as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and receives significant funding from Christian nationalist organizations.
I have lived this pattern in my own community, which makes the abstract statistics feel like something else. The first of these fights I watched up close was in Grass Lake, a small, rural district between Jackson and Ann Arbor. In 2017, its school board voted to let transgender students use the restrooms matching their gender identity, and posted the policy openly on the district website. I drove out for the board meeting. More than a hundred people came, and we listened to parents testify on both sides—all of them, whatever else divided them, plainly loving their children.
The next year the fight reached my own family. In December 2018, a video of community members reading I Am Jazz—a children’s book that explains, in language a young child can follow, what it means to be transgender—was shown in Saline elementary schools. Two of the readers in that video were my own children. The showing drew organized opposition: a parents’ petition and formal complaints. Two months later, an elementary school in my own town of Dexter scheduled an I Am Jazz reading of its own, and it drew the same objections, this time voiced by local pastors.
What I came to understand, sitting in those meetings, was that the anger in the room was not simply local. The talking points were too consistent from district to district, the legal language too uniform, the timing too synchronized to be spontaneous. At a State Board of Education meeting in 2016, convened over the state’s guidance for supporting LGBTQ students, a man stood at the entrance in full military-style gear—an Oath Keeper, a member of the far-right paramilitary group whose leaders would later be convicted of seditious conspiracy for January 6th—holding an American flag on a pole. He was not there to testify. He was there to be seen. A children’s book and a school restroom policy do not, on their own, summon a paramilitary to a statehouse. What summons them is a national movement that has learned to treat a local school board as a front line.
The bans look local. They are not local. They are the visible surface of a deliberate, organized campaign that has successfully deployed the language of parental rights to suppress the education of all children about the actual diversity of human experience.
Charles Blow put the point precisely. The point of these bans is not to protect children. The point is to deceive them.
There is a name for what these bans take away. In 1990, the scholar Rudine Sims Bishop described children’s books as windows and mirrors. Children need mirrors—books in which they can see themselves and know their experience is real. And they need windows—books that let them see into lives different from their own.
The bans deny transgender kids the mirrors that tell them they are not alone and not shameful, and they deny their classmates the windows that build empathy. The research is consistent: children who find themselves in books report higher self-esteem and a greater sense of belonging, and children who read across difference report less prejudice. Removing those books is not a neutral act. It is a political act, and the children it erases pay for it first.
In Florida, Texas, and elsewhere, state-mandated curricula now require teachers to describe slavery as “forced relocation,” and to emphasize ways in which enslaved people supposedly “benefited” from their enslavement. The Ruby Bridges film—a documentary about a six-year-old Black child integrating a New Orleans school in 1960—was banned from a Pinellas County, Florida school. Read that sentence again. The Ruby Bridges film was banned. In 2023.
The same epistemological mechanism is at work in the manufactured doubt about climate science. The scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is among the most robustly established in the history of science—supported by atmospheric physics, oceanography, geology, chemistry, and biology, converging on the same conclusion from multiple independent directions.
The Koch brothers and allied fossil fuel interests have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars manufacturing uncertainty about that consensus. Funding a network of think tanks, media outlets, and academic-sounding organizations specifically designed to make manufactured doubt look like genuine scientific debate.
Manufactured doubt and manufactured certainty are the same weapon wearing different costumes. Manufactured certainty says: the answer is clear, and it’s God. Manufactured doubt says: the answer is unclear, and the experts can’t agree. Different costumes. Same goal. Both are designed to keep honest critical thinking from ever reaching the evidence.
The historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the playbook in their book Merchants of Doubt. The same consultants. The same public relations firms. In some cases the same scientists. Moving over the decades from tobacco to acid rain to the ozone layer to climate change. The product being sold is the same every time. It’s doubt. It is just doubt. It is the permission not to have to decide.
When I tell you that the attacks on the evidence base for gender-affirming care follow this same playbook, I am not speaking metaphorically. The structure is identical. A handful of cherry-picked studies. A flood of op-eds. A set of advocacy organizations that call themselves scientific while being funded by groups with explicitly religious agendas. A coordinated effort to make clinicians look reckless when they cite the peer-reviewed consensus they have spent careers contributing to.
What gives me hope—genuinely, not performatively—is the data about public opinion. A 2023 survey found that majorities of Americans, across political lines, oppose book bans and support age-appropriate education about race and LGBTQ identities. The manufactured certainty of the Christian nationalist movement does not reflect the genuine convictions of most Americans. It reflects the disproportionate power of an organized, well-funded minority that has exploited structural features of American democracy—the Senate, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the filibuster—to impose its agenda on a country that, on most of these questions, disagrees with it. That gap between the certainty being imposed and what most Americans actually believe is where Scientific Rebellion operates.
And the war is not only in K-12. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race-conscious admissions programs at colleges and universities are unconstitutional. The decision was celebrated by the same movement fighting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public schools, criminalizing gender-affirming care, and banning books about Black history. The pattern is not coincidental. The knowledge being produced and transmitted by universities about race, about gender, about the history of power in America is threatening to manufactured certainties that serve specific political interests. The way to neutralize the threat is to delegitimize the institutions producing the knowledge.
Ron DeSantis’s campaign against Florida’s public universities represents perhaps the most aggressive version. The New College of Florida, one of the state’s most academically distinguished institutions, was effectively taken over by a politically appointed board of trustees who replaced its president and faculty with ideologically aligned appointments, gutted its diversity programs, and eliminated its gender studies department. This was not reform. It was the replacement of an institution organized around knowledge with one organized around manufactured certainty.
The long-term consequences of this, from an engineering perspective, are terrifying. Societies that suppress the honest production of knowledge do not become more orderly. They become less capable of managing the problems they face. The Soviet Union’s suppression of Mendelian genetics in favor of Lysenkoism produced famines that cost millions of lives. The suppression of epidemiological science in favor of ideological preferences about COVID-19 cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. The suppression of climate science is contributing to a slow-motion catastrophe whose full costs we are only beginning to experience.
When we let manufactured certainty override the honest production of knowledge, people die. That is not a metaphor. It is the historical record.
The defense of public education—of schools and universities as institutions organized around the honest transmission of knowledge—is not a partisan issue. It is a survival issue. The capacity of a democratic society to govern itself effectively depends on the capacity of its citizens to think critically. To evaluate evidence. To distinguish between what is known and what is asserted. That capacity is built in schools. When schools are converted into vehicles for manufacturing certainty instead of cultivating honest uncertainty, the society loses something that cannot easily be rebuilt.
And the same logic is driving the school choice movement—the expansion of vouchers and education savings accounts that allow public money to flow to private religious schools. Its most candid advocates are explicit. The goal is not to improve public education but to replace it. To convert a universal public good into a market.
And when education becomes a purely private good, it becomes segregated—not only by race, as the original Christian school movement intended, but by religion, by ideology, by class. The children most harmed are, predictably, the ones who were already most vulnerable.
I have testified at enough school board meetings to know what those rooms are when they work: the one place where a community still has to face itself, all of itself, in public. Dismantle the public schools and you dismantle the room.
But here is the part of the story the manufactured certainty movement tries to suppress. People are fighting back. The book ban movement has been met, in community after community, with organized resistance that is often more powerful than the ban organizers anticipated.
In Llano County, Texas, a federal judge ordered the books restored, and a coalition of residents organized legal challenges that kept the fight alive for years. The American Library Association’s 2023 report found that the number of books challenged was at an all-time high—but also that the number of successful challenges was far lower than the number attempted. Because communities were organizing to resist.
And the kids who are most directly affected by the bans are not passive. A significant portion of the most visible resistance has come from the students themselves. They organize reading groups for banned books. They testify at school board meetings with more clarity and courage than many adults. Emma Diehl, a student in Keller, Texas, became nationally known at seventeen for challenging the banning of books in her district. She is not an anomaly. She is a pattern.
The children are watching. And they are also acting. Some of them—like my son—have been watching adults make choices about what to fight for, and taking note. The children coming up behind him, in states that have banned books, restricted history, and criminalized the care of transgender youth—what will shape them? What do we want it to be?
That is the most consequential educational policy decision of this generation.
We answer it in every school board meeting, every legislative hearing, every conversation with a neighbor about what our children should be allowed to know. The other side shows up for all of them. We must do the same.
