The Trump administration announced last week that any scientific findings the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) completes will first be “reviewed” by White House staff members.I could point out the blatant propaganda machine at work or the insanity of climate change deniers censoring data, but let’s back up for a moment.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created for a lot of reasons, but here are the most essential:

• all Americans are protected from significant risks to human health and the environment where they live, learn and work;

• national efforts to reduce environmental risk are based on the best available scientific information;

• environmental protection is an integral consideration in U.S. policies concerning natural resources, human health, economic growth, energy, transportation, agriculture, industry, and international trade, and these factors are similarly considered in establishing environmental policy

When a new government comes into power looking to be the *Authority* on knowledge, scientific discovery and even evidence itself, there’s a big shift in ideology.

Science becomes the natural enemy of the autocratic regime.

While scientists and researchers are motivated by facts and figures, politcos have a few more interests at stake. There’s the party agenda, having to answer to hardline constituents, and the motivation of re-election. It’s political dogma over scientific fact.

So, priority number one of any respectable regime is to regulate the organization in charge of such knowledge to control what information is disseminated to the public.

When those in power choke off communication to the public, there’s a name for this.

Propaganda.

The active editing, censoring and denial of basic facts to fit a party position or narrative is anti-democracy. It is a rejection of truth in favor of power.

So what does an authoritarian regime do in the face of data that disprove the party’s position? Silence the oppostition.

Which brings us back to the reviewal of EPA findings by politicians.

In response to swift backlash from journalists and the scientific community at large, a White House spokesman later “clarified” his statements, saying that the reviews don’t apply to new fidnings, but rather only to what exists on the website.

As if that is going to calm us all down.

What’s on the EPA website is literally all the information that the public has access to! It’s all we have from the EPA on climate change, wildlife, pollution, water issues and, you know, the stuff that ensures life on this planet will carry on.

SIDENOTE: When I say “autocracy,” I’m not talking about the 20th-century, over-the-top decorated leader with marching armies and trumpets screaming into the wind.

Trump may be a fan of drama and fanfare, but even he isn’t that ridiculous.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Alright, maybe he has some of those tendencies.

But the days of European dictatorship were some generations ago. Consider for a moment what a autocratic regime in 2017 would like. How does social media play into it?

We all remember the rogue Twitter accounts that began tweeting a boatload of scientific facts and figures in response to the Trump media blackout of some government agencies.

It was fun and games until suddenly it wasn’t.

The Trump administration pounced on the EPA as if it got a hold of Trump’s *alleged* Russian pee-pee tape or something equally controversial. The heavy-handedness it used against the spread of scientific data is astounding.

Emails sent to EPA employees from the Trump administration, and later shared with The Associated Press, have explicit and “specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency’s social media accounts.”

Scientists are literally being barred from sharing facts and their findings with the public.

The Trump administration is ardent that this social media cutoff is temporary. But I’d take that promise with a grain of salt.  Lie-making and doubling down on those false remarks is a normal pattern of behavior for the Trump team.

Perhaps Trump doesn’t care what the truth actually is. And, as the most powerful man in the world, he can fabricate reality all he wants, knowing that a key voting bloc in this country will support him no matter what.

But the truth will be waiting for all of us sooner or later.