Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

Shawn Lawrence Otto’s Fool Me Twice is a forensic examination of the systemic and deliberate erosion of science’s role in American public life and policy. It posits that the nation’s founding compact—a republic dependent on an informed electorate—is unraveling under the strain of complex, science-driven challenges and a concerted political effort to replace empirical reasoning with ideology. The book frames this not as an academic concern but as an existential crisis for democratic governance, where decisions on climate, energy, health, and education are increasingly severed from factual reality.

Otto meticulously documents the mechanisms of this assault, beginning with the profound scientific illiteracy within the U.S. Congress and the media’s failure to accurately communicate scientific consensus. He dissects the journalistic norm of false equivalence, which grants fringe viewpoints equal weight with established science, thereby corrupting public understanding. The narrative delves into specific case studies, including the orchestrated controversy of 'Climategate,' where stolen emails were willfully misconstrued to undermine climate science, and the popular but deeply flawed counterarguments presented in works like SuperFreakonomics.

The analysis extends to the political economy of denialism, tracing how corporate interests and ideological movements fund campaigns to sow doubt on issues from evolution to vaccine safety. Otto argues this creates a feedback loop: a poorly informed public elects scientifically illiterate leaders, who then enact policies that further degrade educational and informational systems. The result is a government passing resolutions denying climate change while the physical world manifests its consequences.

Ultimately, Fool Me Twice serves as both a dire warning and a call to arms. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the integrity of public discourse, the functionality of democracy in the 21st century, and the urgent need to rebuild a civic culture that respects evidence, expertise, and the scientific method as non-negotiable pillars of societal survival and progress.

Readers overwhelmingly praise the book as a vital, clarion call, hailing its rigorous and impassioned defense of science as a civic necessity. The consensus finds Otto’s synthesis of political strategy, media failure, and historical context both enlightening and profoundly alarming. A common critique, however, notes the prose can become dense with detail, and some wish for more visual aids to clarify complex data narratives. The work is universally regarded as accessible to a non-specialist but demanding in its intellectual seriousness.