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, at its core, 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.

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.

The historian Randall Balmer, in his book *Bad Faith*, documents something the religious right tells about itself that is false. The standard story is that the Religious Right was born in 1973 in response to *Roe v. Wade*. That is not what happened. As Balmer documents with extensive primary-source evidence, the actual origin of the modern Religious Right was earlier — the early 1970s — and the issue was not abortion. It was segregation. Specifically, the threat to the tax-exempt status of segregation academies — private Christian schools that had been founded in the South to avoid desegregation after *Brown v. Board of Education*. When the IRS moved, under President Carter, to deny tax-exempt status to schools that practiced racial discrimination, a wave of outrage swept through evangelical leadership. The movement that became the Religious Right was organized around that grievance. Abortion was grafted on later, as a more palatable public banner.

Paul Weyrich, the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and one of the main architects of this movement, said the quiet part out loud at a 1980 gathering of evangelical leaders. He stated, plainly, that the movement’s goal was not to expand the number of voters. In fact, he said, “our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Voter suppression, not voter persuasion, is the path to minority rule. That was the foundational insight. It is still operative.

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. In 2017, my hometown of Dexter, Michigan — a small, relatively progressive college town west of Ann Arbor — became a flashpoint when an elementary school scheduled a reading of *I Am Jazz*, a children’s book by transgender activist Jazz Jennings that simply explains, in language accessible to young children, what it means to be transgender. Local churches organized protests. Conservative community groups circulated petitions. The school ultimately offered an opt-out option. In neighboring Saline, a similar uproar erupted when another school considered age-appropriate LGBTQ-inclusive materials. In nearby Grass Lake, a group called Concerned Parents and Taxpayers, allied with the Alliance Defending Freedom, threatened legal action against districts that adopted inclusive policies.

What made these episodes significant was not the local controversy itself. Small towns have always had culture war disputes. What made them significant was the organizational infrastructure behind them. The Oath Keepers had a visible presence in the region. The Alliance Defending Freedom — a legal organization founded by a coalition of evangelical leaders and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — was providing legal support to anti-LGBTQ parent groups across the state.

What looked like organic community opposition was, in significant part, a coordinated campaign using local grievances as the entry point for a national strategy developed by well-funded organizations with an explicit agenda of dismantling LGBTQ-inclusive education. 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.

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.

This is the industrial-scale production of false uncertainty. The deliberate manufacture of ambiguity about well-established facts in order to protect interests that would be threatened by honest reckoning. 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.

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 attack on knowledge in higher education follows the same logic as the attack on K-12 education. 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.

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 kids are watching. And they are also acting.

We must do the same, 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 does.

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