Science Counterpunch

“You can’t respond to a propaganda campaign with facts.”

Because propaganda doesn’t need evidence. It needs a target. A decontextualized number, a catchy phrase and a villain are enough to turn ordinary research into a “censorship-industrial complex,” launch congressional subpoenas, and fill years of courtrooms and news cycles. When the lawsuits are finally dismissed for lack of evidence, the story has already done its job.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Renée DiResta, propaganda researcher, Georgetown professor and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She went from CIA intern and Wall Street trader to mapping the anti-vaccine movement and Russia’s troll farm for the US Senate. Then she became the “queen” of a censorship machine that never existed. We unpack how she became a character in someone else’s conspiracy theory, what that reveals about how modern propaganda works, and what we can build instead.

We talk about:

* how anti-vaxxers pivoted from “toxins” to “liberty,” laying the groundwork for COVID-era “medical freedom”

* what people still get wrong about Russia’s “bots,” and why they were mostly trolls doing activation, not persuasion

* how she became a supervillain in a cinematic “Twitterfiles” universe and why winning in court still loses the news cycle

* influencers, algorithms and crowds: the asymmetry of passion, audience capture, and why “if you make it trend, you make it true”

* the fix: her experiments with AI-written community notes, MySky social feed, middleware, and proving you’re human online without giving up your privacy

Her work is about understanding the machinery that manufactures reality, and taking back control of the feeds that shape what we believe. So you better listen to what she has learned.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on propaganda and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback?

Let us know in the comments!

The COVID contrarian movement sold itself as a grassroots rebellion of brave, censored truth-tellers. But what if they were just part of a larger machine all too willing to invest in its messengers?

Anti-science narratives are often cultivated, credentialed and bankrolled. Behind the “brave dissenters” sit think tanks funded by billionaires, prize committees invented out of thin air, and donor-advised funds that let anyone pour millions into anti-vaccine groups without leaving a name. “Dark money is getting darker.”

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by investigative journalist Walker Bragman, co-founder of the Accountability Journalism Institute and author of the newsletter Important Context, who has spent five years tracing the money flows behind the COVID contrarian movement. We unpack how the Great Barrington Declaration grew out of a Koch-funded free-market think tank, how a network of anonymous donors and fake academies turned fringe figures into “experts,” and how those same figures now run America’s health agencies.

We talk about:

* how dark money hides behind nonprofits, donor-advised funds and paper tax filings, and why it’s getting harder to trace

* the Great Barrington Declaration, the Brownstone Institute’s mystery $600,000 donor, and the prestige machine that elevated Jay Bhattacharya to NIH director

* why “both sides do it” misses the asymmetry of right-wing dark money infrastructure

* what a fix could look like: donor transparency, limits on political spending, ending tax-exempt status for propaganda outfits, and public funding for watchdog journalism

Exposing the funders behind anti-science actors highlights just how deep money has penetrated public discourse and policy, and who pays for the ideas that end up running scientific institutions into the ground.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback?

Let us know in the comments!

Biosafety rarely ends at the lab door, and biosecurity coverage gives us scary headlines but wrong perceptions. Right now, bird flu is spreading through a Utah mink farm, while officials scramble without a response plan. Meanwhile, Washington is busy fighting boogeyman of the last pandemic’s origin story, turning it into vindictive research bans, cancelled funding and vaccine contracts, and scientists who can no longer do the work that keeps us safe.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist, Fort Detrick veteran researcher and professor at the Johns Hopkins University who recently testified before Congress on biotech innovation and biosecurity, for a clear-eyed look at what biosecurity really means and how policy by vibes leaves us less safe. We unpack the difference between scary stories and real risks, why gutting scientific capacity is a security threat in itself, and what an evidence-based defense against the next pandemic should look like.

We talk about:

* biosafety vs. biosecurity—what they mean, and why they matter far beyond the lab

* fiction vs. reality: what thrillers like Biological War get right, and why real outbreaks rarely start with a villain

* how the lab-leak narrative became a funding policy—and what vague gain-of-function bans cost us in the race against bird flu

* smart rules vs. vibes rules for lab safety, AI biothreats, and apocalyptic narratives shaping public perceptions

* what governments, institutions, and listeners can do now to build pandemic preparedness

This isn’t about being for or against scary biosecurity science. It’s about keeping evidence, and reality, in charge — before the next outbreak decides how bad it gets.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on propaganda and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback?

Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

I´m not going to lie. It often feels impossible to keep on top of things these days, between career, raising two young kids, health challenges and just trying to function, the day has few hours left to think about what I can do to make a difference in public discourse, or just as a citizen with a democratic inclination to fight rising authoritarianism and anti-science grifters.

I know many readers here are similarily exhausted; so this is not to complain but to show that maybe there are small things we can do here and there.

For example, I recently created an interactive Covid-19 origins timeline based on the research in my book with the help of AI tools. It´s not perfect, but it is a lot more accessible than a 500 page book. I prototyped (or vibe-coded) the html for the timeline up in a few hours using Claude code, because I thought this is a useful thing to have and a bounded application of AI I can stand behind. (I also wrote a new AI use policy for my blog here)

Because of this experiment, I got a bit more ambitious to try to create a useful resource from our Science Counterpunch interviews. You can watch the live video explainer on top, and you can find the library here.

Sharing is caring?

What the Science Counterpunch library actually is

I went back through every transcript from all ten episodes and used AI to summarize and create ultimately 305 individual insight cards. Every card is attributed by name, and 169 of them carry a direct, timestamped link back to the exact second in the original video where the guest said it to make sure context can be re-established.

The more interesting part of this library is what it makes visible, which is that there are a lot of issues, but also a lot of proposed solutions. Overall, our guests had proposed up 90+ solutions (of course with various degree of overlaps or anecdotal touch)

I believe that by making the problem and solution space parsable, at a glance, maybe it opens a way to find some nuggets of insights for people who do not have the time to listen to 10+ hours of podcast inverviews and then do the pattern-analysis on top of it themselves.

But check for yourself.

The library has many ways to explore the insights:

The Insight Card Library — search and filter across all ten episodes and according to category (e.g solutions). This is to really explore freely. You can also type in a name, a tactic, a keyword; and every guest who touched upon it.

The Problem → Solution Map — I let AI group every problem-type card into 7 clusters and every solution-type card into 7 clusters, this is not perfect but a useful way to parse the problem and solution space.

The Episode × Category Heatmap — which episodes lean hardest into which kind of content. Episode 6 for example, with Gregg Gonsalves, is almost entirely focused on actism solutions. That is not a coincidence; that is who Gregg is and what fights he has actually been in.

The Recurring Concepts Map — just a different way to show where guests overlapped (e.g many had used RFKjr as a case example of a bad actors with real-world consequences)

It’s a tool. It’s also just fun to poke around in

I don’t want to hide the second half of this.

Yes, the library exists to make tactics, systemic problems, and solutions legible fast for people with little time and much exhaustion.

But it’s also just enjoyable to click through — to follow a thread from a problem cluster to the solutions guests actually proposed for it, to go down a rabbit hole starting from one guest’s name and end up somewhere you didn’t plan on.

I built it to be explored, not learned.

Participatory engagement for people looking for inspiration in the fight against anti-science.

Maybe that is not your cup of tea.

Either way, this exists now.

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Is a cosmic rock truly an alien spaceship that the government does not want you to know about? Misrepresentations of scientific inquiry or hypotheses often aren’t an accident, but a structural by‑product of how curiosity, media incentives, and speculation collide. Space science, especially the search for alien life, sits at the perfect fault line: high uncertainty, high awe, and enormous public attention. The result is a constant churn of overreach, misinterpretation, and claims that outrun the evidence.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by astrophysicist David Kipping—director of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University and creator of the Cool Worlds channel—to examine how serious science pushes back. We unpack why astronomy and astrobiology attract so much distortion, how careful speculation differs from storytelling dressed up as science, and what it means to communicate uncertainty without killing curiosity.

We talk about:

* why space and alien life grab the public imagination—and why that makes audiences vulnerable to grifters

* the difference between compelling speculation and testable scientific hypotheses

* working with institutions like NASA, and where institutional communication succeeds or fails

* the risks and rewards of engaging massive platforms that don’t consistently respect scientific limits

* what scientists, creators, and audiences can do better or differently to stop misrepresentation before it hardens into belief

Being careful and evidence-driven isn’t about shutting down wonder or fun speculations. It’s about protecting them—by keeping evidence in charge.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Anti-science isn’t a bug in the modern information ecosystem—it’s the feature. Today’s secular gurus don’t need robes or rituals; they wield academic credentials, technical jargon, and a galaxy-brained confidence that turns YouTube, Twitter, and podcasts into pulpits. Their gospel? That institutions are corrupt, science is suspect, and only they have the answers.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Chris Kavanagh and Matt Brown, hosts of Decoding the Gurus, for a forensic look at the rise of anti-science influencers and the cult dynamics that keep their audiences loyal. We dissect how “decorative scholarship” and anti-institutional rhetoric undermine trust, why audiences crave affirmation over information, and what happens when universities and media fail to defend the basics.

We talk about:

* the anatomy of a secular guru—and why credentials are both weapon and shield

* how online communities form around grievance, identity, and ritualized in-group policing

* the psychology of audiences: why emotional energy, resentment, and narcissism fuel the ecosystem

* why institutions struggle to respond; and what academic freedom really means in the age of information warfare

* practical strategies for fighting back: critical consumption, evidence, and refusing to feed the fire

This isn’t about dunking for sport. It’s about understanding the playbook—and arming yourself for the next round.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Modern authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with tanks. It announces itself with spreadsheets, budget cuts, accreditation fights, and the quiet capture of institutions most people barely notice—until they’re gone.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Professor Christina Pagel, Professor of Operational Research at UCL and creator of the Trump Action Tracker, a data‑driven record of nearly 3,000 actions documenting the attacks on democratic and scientific institutions in the U.S.

Drawing on her public communication work with Independent SAGE, Christina now raises the alarm about US politics with hard-to-refute data; explains why universities, regulators, media, and science itself are always early targets, and how fear and anticipatory compliance do much of the authoritarian work for free.

We talk about:

* her data collection project “Trump action tracker” and the administration’s method behind the madness

* why modern authoritarianism is quiet, bureaucratic, and strategic

* how controlling data and “official numbers” beats outright censorship

* why institutions don’t protect themselves—and often can’t

* how vulnerable UK institutions really are (even the ones you assume are safe)

* and why paying attention, speaking up, and refusing to disengage still matters

This isn’t about doom-scrolling news. It’s about pattern recognition—and a warning from someone who knows how quickly “it can’t happen here” turns into “it already has.”

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

What happens when fringe anti-vaxxers move from fleecing online communities to the highest halls of power?

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Dr. Dan Wilson, molecular biologist and creator of the Debunk the Funk YouTube Channel, to dissect how anti‑vaccine narratives became mainstream—and why so many institutions seem unprepared to stop them.

Dan walks us through his journey from being conspiracy‑curious as a teenager to becoming a meticulous science communicator, explaining why teaching the scientific method matters more than just throwing facts at people. We unpack the rise of COVID contrarians, the business model behind misinformation, and how grifters learned to weaponize frustration, identity, and “medical freedom.”

We also talk about:

* Why journalists keep asking the wrong questions

* How figures like RFK Jr. slip past accountability

* Why being polite to ordinary people is imperative, yet being polite to grifters a recipe for disaster

* What burnout looks like when misinformation keeps winning

* And how ordinary people can still make a difference without losing their sanity

This isn’t about losing faith in humanity. It’s about learning how bad ideas spread—and how to push back with evidence, empathy, and better questions that spark curiosity rather then reactance.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we welcome epidemiologist, MacArthur Fellow, and lifelong AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves to talk about what happens when politics is at odds with public health.

Gregg was on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic with ACT UP in the 1990s, helping force institutions like the NIH and FDA to accelerate research and expand access to lifesaving treatments. Later, he brought that same activist-scientist playbook to South Africa, confronting deadly AIDS denialism at the level of government policy.

What happens today in the US not only echoes but in many cases exceeds the terrors of the past.

We talk about state-sanctioned pseudoscience, the capture of public-health institutions by political actors dead-set on burning down the house, and what has already been destroyed for a generation. We also dig into what activists and scientists did in the 90s to change the course of history—and what those lessons mean now, as global health systems face funding cuts, political sabotage, and a new wave of anti-science ideology.

How do you defend public health when the notion of reality itself is under attack?

You speak up. You organize locally. And you fight them for every school board, city council or community leadership seat at the table where you can make the lives of people around you better.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Ancient aliens. Lost Ice Age civilizations. Atlantis hidden under the pyramids.

Pseudo-archaeology is having a moment—and it’s not just harmless fun.

In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we step into the ring with archaeologist Flint Dibble and science YouTuber Kayleigh Dunning to break down how conspiracy history took over the internet—and what it takes to fight back.

We talk about the rise of viral pseudo-history pushed by figures like Graham Hancock, why “secret knowledge” narratives spread so easily online, and how social media incentives reward myths over evidence.

But this isn’t just about bad history. It’s about anti-intellectualism, harassment campaigns against scholars, and the growing gap between academic knowledge and public discourse.

So how do you push back?

By stepping into the arena. By meeting audiences where they are. And by showing that our human history is far richer than grifter fantasies want to make you believe.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.