On April 9, 2020, my father died at the age of 73. Six days later, we buried him, unceremoniously, in a plot next to his younger twin brother. It was a blustery day with that early spring chill in the air. As I stood near my father's casket at the cemetery, a worker kept chiding me to stay ten feet away from the other few attendees, including Dad's pastor, my widowed mother, and my young children, who were 13, ten, and six at the time.

Dad was a Vietnam veteran who served in the Navy as a Storekeeper on the U.S.S. Yellowstone. But there were no military honors. No flag. No "Taps." Only because a dear friend pulled some strings did a trio from the Burlington VFP Post Honor Guard show up to give dad a quick gun salute.

As the pastor blessed the grave, I sobbed. But no one could comfort me in my grief. It wasn't allowed. There were no hugs. There was no luncheon afterwards. We simply had to go home. So I grieved by getting a massive tattoo on my upper left arm, because tattoo parlors were "essential," it seems.

Why? Because a few weeks prior, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, my governor, issued orders that either prohibited or severely limited public gatherings like my father's funeral. Schools were closed. Those who could work remotely were also stuck at home.

We were told that "two weeks to flatten the curve" of the COVID pandemic was a small sacrifice to make to keep people alive. I worked in a hospital during the height of COVID; we were issued letters to carry in our car, dubbing us "essential workers." Several of the third-shift staff reported that those papers came in handy after being pulled over by law enforcement, making sure no one was leaving their home without the government's permission.

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If we dared to question the lockdowns or school closures, we were labeled "grandma killers" and "anti-science." If we dreamed of exercising our First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and redress the government for grievances — and being forced to stay home and wear a mask in public was a legitimate grievance — we were told we couldn't do that. It was "too risky" and could spread COVID, killing people.

Masks? You had to wear them when you went shopping or to school (in those places that didn't do "remote learning"). But if you went out to eat, you could take your mask off at the table to consume food. Kids at band practice could cut holes in their masks to play instruments.

None of it made sense, but if you dared question it, people lost their minds. And to this day, I still see the occasional person wearing an N95 mask or gloves at the store or gas station.

Then, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd died while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department.

And everything changed.

Suddenly, Black Lives Matter protests were magically immune from spreading COVID because the "disease" of racism was far more deadly and dangerous than the virus that had just shut down the entire world.

And George Floyd, the career criminal who was high on a cocktail of drugs when he died, had not one, not two, but three funerals that summer. Crowds gathered to weep at his gold-plated coffin, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who probably would've crossed the street if he'd seen Floyd on the sidewalk. 

My father was thrown into a hole. A man who served his nation, and the family who mourned him, were told we didn't matter. But the drug addict criminal did. For me, that was one of the defining moments of my life, and — frankly — the lives of my older two children.

We saw the injustices, the abuse, and the hypocrisy and it forever changed how we viewed the world. For many, that meant a complete collapse in the trust of science, something chemist Simon Maechling laments.

The collapse of trust in science is going to go down in history as one of the most sad, bizarre, and destructive social contagions of modern times.

We cured diseases, fed billions, and powered nations - and people ran toward conspiracies instead.

— Simon Maechling (@simonmaechling) December 6, 2025

I would argue that most people didn't actually stop trusting science; they stopped trusting the politically-motivated, agenda-driven "experts" who have turned abused science.

And it's not just COVID that did it, although the blatant hypocrisy of saying my friends couldn't hold their wedding, but BLM was allowed to burn Kenosha to the ground, was a major factor. It's everything the Left has done in the name of "science" for the last 40 years.

Going back to my time in elementary school, I was told global warming — sorry, climate change — was going to put New York and Florida underwater. We'd have acid rain dropping from the sky, the hole in the ozone layer would turn Earth into an oven, and we'd all be dead before I was old enough to drink. Well, I'm now twice the legal drinking age, and Florida is thriving, New York (for better or worse) isn't at the bottom of the Atlantic, and my yard is covered in snow instead of acid.

That didn't stop the climate activist Left from telling us we had five or ten years to "solve" climate change or the world would end. When the calendar flipped and the world did not, in fact, meet its demise, those same activists moved the goalposts.

"But we really, really mean it this time!"

It also didn't help that the "solutions" to climate change were lifted straight from the works of Karl Marx. Collectivism via 15-minute cities. No air travel. No pet ownership. No eating meat. Some went so far as to envision a world of communal kitchens and the banning of personal washers and dryers. If you were a good little citizen who ate your bug- and plant-based gruel, you could earn enough carbon credits to run the air conditioning for five minutes on a Tuesday. Meanwhile, the John Kerrys, Barack Obamas, and Al Gores of the world flew to meetings on private jets, bought massive oceanfront properties, and lived the lavish lifestyles they want to deny the rest of us. In the name of "saving Gaia," of course.

And then there's the issue of gender. Hoo boy, where do I start with that? Since time immemorial, human beings have known there were two genders: male and female. With the advent of genetics and the scientific progression, we learned that sex is assigned at conception, thanks to the X or Y chromosome in the father's sperm. Sure, there were aberrations — chromosomes mutate, and intersex people are born — but the vast majority of human beings were male or female from the get-go.

Somewhere along the line, First World nations decided that just wasn't inclusive or open-minded enough, and determined gender was "fluid" or a "spectrum" or something assigned willy-nilly by a doctor at birth. Unless that doctor was Stevie Wonder, seeing a newborn baby with a penis meant one thing: it's a boy. Nowadays, external genitalia is no longer considered an indicator of genetic reality.

Instead, we're told women can have penises and men can give birth. We pump "trans women" full of chemicals so they can mimic breastfeeding and feel "included" in parenthood. All the while we reduce actual women to anatomical parts — persons with "front holes" or "womb owner" — or our bodily functions, "persons who menstruate" or "birthing persons." My aforementioned Governor went a step farther and labeled women "inseminated persons" in state documents, so as not to hurt the feelings of mentally ill men (the feelings of women like me, however, do not matter). 

The same people who were screaming "FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!" five short years ago were now telling young girls, "CHANGE IN FRONT OF THE NAKED MAN! HE SAYS HE'S A WOMAN, BIGOT!" 

They also forced women and girls to bend the knee to men and boys in their sports, resulting in not only catastrophic injuries to girls but also the loss of championships, world records, and coveted spots in competitions. The Biden administration even tried to rewrite Title IX to punish women and girls who objected to such absurdity.

So I trust the science. I trust that COVID came from a lab. I trust that the vaccine and masks didn't work, and I know that lockdowns and school closures did more harm than good. I trust that climate changes, and I trust that man-made activity has far less impact than the activists argue it does. I also trust that eating bugs or giving up my cat won't do a damn thing to control the weather. I also trust that there are two genders, male and female, and that no amount of drugs or surgery can alter human DNA. Men can't get pregnant. Women don't have penises. 

That's trusting in science.

The collapse of trust in science is sad. Science — when logical, objective, and consistently applied — is a wonderful thing. Maechling is correct that it has "cured diseases, fed billions, and powered nations."

But he is wrong if he thinks the public's perception of science shifted simply because "conspiracy theories" sounded more appealing. That's not why what happened happened.

It happened because the Left gutted actual science and wore it as a skin suit to advance its political agenda, and turned it into a dogmatic religion in which merely asking questions is the highest form of heresy. So if Macheling wants to figure out why no one "trusts the science" anymore, he can start by looking in the mirror.

Speaking only for myself, I have always trusted the science. I don't trust the Left, and never will.