NOTHING MEANS NOTHING ANYMORE.

At PJ Media, Rand Simberg headlines,

We are all scientists

and uses a cute, familiar routine to demonstrate this ("If you’ve ever gone through a thought process like that in dealing with a life situation, congratulations! You are a scientist"). But Simberg isn't really trying to make his readers appreciate the scientific method: He's mainly running a new angle on the traditional conservative argument that scientists who see a trend toward climate change that should be addressed are all just lying for liberalism.

Simberg says a sentence (!) in a USA Today story about some environmental official who tweeted a climate skeptic message "would seem to imply that only 'scientists' (however the reporter defines it) are allowed to be skeptical about scientific theories" -- though the story implies no such thing. Taking off from this overwrought imputation of censorship, he really starts working the dry ice machine and thunder sheets:

When we are not allowed to discuss issues that involve policy actions that could have devastating effects on the world’s economy because we are not part of an apparently credentialed priesthood, we are not being allowed to even debate science, let alone deny it. We are instead apparently apostates in a new non-theistic, but very powerful religion, complete with believers, heretics, sin and indulgences, who must be silenced.

Many, many climate skeptics publish in the popular press, and in fact one of our two major parties has gone total climate-change denialist, despite the embargo of the liberal-fascist scientists. Yet Simberg concludes:

Which simply shows that sometimes, just as war is too important to be left to the generals, science can be too important to be left to the “scientists.”

Elsewhere in the same venue Frank J. Fleming, an alleged humorist (Jonah Goldberg is a fan, which tells all), headlines

There Are No Such Things as 'Scientists'

The ensuing article is more or less the same as Simberg's except with something resembling jokes. It begins with a similar exercise to Simberg's ("Find a book. Hold it over the floor. Now release it. Write down what you observe. Boom! You’ve just become a scientist") and proceeds  to the conclusion that you can't trust guys who snootily insist they're using empirical data to form rational conclusions about the physical universe:

Now all of this isn’t meant to belittle science, which is a great process by which we discover facts about the world around us; you should probably make use of it yourself. This is, though, meant to belittle scientists, who are just people, and if you’ve ever been around people, you know they’re easily biased and prone to arrogance and error, and thus everything they say should be taken with a grain of salt.

These articles demonstrate how far conservative thought has come on this subject. It's not just promoting the idea that a cadre of whitecoats is trying to destroy America with false, liberal information, perversely ignoring the far greater bribes oil and gas companies can offer them. It further suggests that any time some guy with a sheepskin tries to tell you what's what, you should mistrust him as a matter of course, because he's no more likely than any other snake-oil salesman to be telling the truth. Why should he? They only spend years in school so they can collect Obamabribes and sneer at good folk like you 'n' me. Once upon a time, when they were taking us to the moon and inventing boner pills, scientists could be trusted; but now that most of them have come to conclusions that are injurious to Republican campaign donors' interests, they're just another bunch of moochers.

And they wonder why kids aren't taking STEM classes.