I sometimes read on social media about the apparent contradiction between right-wingers' positive attitudes toward tech and their negative attitudes toward a lot of medicine. After all, both are rooted in science. That said, there is a commonality between these two sets of attitudes: the role of regulation. A lot of tech is under- or unregulated, and the supplements that Trump’s favored quacks and talking heads peddle are not regulated either. Medicine and medications, on the other hand, are regulated. And we have mandatory public health measures.

This is not to say that there is anything principled about their dislike of regulation. If the FDA was founded in 1906 with the support of business because expert-based standards and trust would benefit business, that insight seems to be absent from the current discourse. Instead, the quacks, grifters, and monopoly capitalists value their freedom to muck about with society and the environment as they please, secure in the knowledge that they’ll have the might to be right on the so-called open market of goods and ideas, especially after capturing the federal government.