#2735: Steve Daines

Steve Daines has been serving as the junior United States senator from Montana since 2015, and has generally taken the wingnut positions – opposition to marriage equality, attempting to overturn the presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2020, opposition to net neutrality and to creating an independent commission to investigate the 2021 Capitol attack – you’d expect, including attitudes toward Donald Trump that are strikingly illustrative of the principle of political expediency.

 

For our purposes, however, Daines is most notably for his rather consistent denialism on scientific matters. A climate change denialist, Daines has claimed that “to suggest that [climate change] human-caused is not a sound scientific conclusion.” Of course, Daines wouldn’t be able to distinguish science from incoherent substack rant if his life depended on it. Daines is also a creationist and has advocated for creationism being taught in public school: “What the schools should teach is, as it relates to biology and science is that they have, um, there’s evolution theory, there’s creation theory, and so forth. I think we should teach students to think critically, and teach students that there are evolutionary theories, there’s intelligent-design theories, and allow the students to make up their minds. But I think those kinds of decisions should be decided at the local school board level. Personally I’d like to teach my kids both sides of the equation there and let them come up to their own conclusion on it.” Yeah, he systematically covers virtually all the talking points of the Discovery Institute-led intelligent design movement there, leaving little doubt from where he has gotten his information, and it is certainly not from science.

 

His views apparently enjoyed some support among Montana constituents, however.

 

Diagnosis: Crackpot denialist and conspiracy theorist. There are, of course, plenty of them in positions of power these days, and Daines is fairly typical, but still! It is worth taking a moment to reflect on how absolutely insane it is that someone like Steve Daines would be entrusted with power.