Over 20 years ago, Professor Tyrone Hayes of U.C. Berkeley sent a thunderclap throughout agriculture. He published a paper in PNAS showing that a popular weedkiller, named atrazine, was changing the vocal behavior and therefore mating of frogs. In the words of Hayes, it was making them 'gay.'
Frogs are an indicator species. I was concerned. EPA was concerned biologists were concerned. The manufacturer of the weedkiller was really concerned.
The problem was none of it was true. Hayes refused to show his data to EPA, claiming they were colluding with pesticide companies, and EPA found no other evidence the effects he claimed were happening. No one else has ever been able to replicate it. As I revealed in the Wall Street Journal, his work hadn't even been peer-reviewed. Instead, using a 19th-century legacy mechanism, a friend of his made himself the sole-reviewer and handed it to the editors. PNAS closed that loophole a few weeks later.
This was the kind of thing he was writing to women at the atrazine manufacturer, Syngenta.
Hayes was just unhinged. There was no science involved, his data were probably just Photoshop - he can prove me wrong at any time by letting me or anyone at EPA see his results.
Being completely debunked has not stopped anti-science activists, who are nearly all on the left, (and, we are reminded again since October of last year, anti-Semitic) from repeating it as fact.
Yet the anti-science left once owned the anti-vaccine movement also. In 2020, Democrats including President Biden claimed President Trump was risking American lives by rushing a COVID-19 vaccine to approval. They all claimed MMR vaccines caused autism. The possible pandemic before the second coronavirus pandemic (MERS) was not going to have enough vaccines because President Biden was concerned that vaccine preservatives might cause autism.
Anti-vax dominance by the left lasted until President Biden won the election, the vaccines worked, and now they take credit for them and say Republicans are...anti-corporate. Morons on the right dutifully complied and became anti-vaccine, even embracing 'bear cub carcass in Central Park' crackpot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who once invented and self-diagnosed a disease for himself to try and get out of paying alimony to the woman he was divorcing.
With a right-wing conspiracy theorist now taking up the 'atrazine makes frogs gay' mantra, the left is going to run from it and call it the nonsense it always was. That means lawyers will abandon it - no left-wing San Francisco jury, no easy judgment against science - and that means the Biden administration will stop using epidemiology to insist on a tolerance level so far below safe levels that any use at all would exceed it, making it a ban.
Calling off the progressive war on atrazine will be good for farmers, good for poor people who've seen food costs rise 44% thanks to gross economic mismanagement, and good for the environment. So keep attacking science, Mr. Starbuck, there are a lot more left-wing anti-science activists than there are on the right, so getting them hating you more than they hate weedkillers will be a big win for everyone.
