The Union of Sybaritic Stalinist Republicans: The New USSR: Lysenkoism, Lies, and Luxury

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Nowhere is the Stalinist bent of the newly-Russophilic Republican Party more evident — or more chilling — than in its full-hearted commitment to Lysenkoism, one of the Soviet Union’s early forays into science-denial.

This movement did not start with Donald Trump, but it has reached terrifying new heights two years into his administration, most notably in the furiously intensified war on the idea — on even the mention — of anthropogenic global climate change.

Trofim Lysenko directed the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, from the late 1920s until 1964. He and his followers viewed science through an ideological lens, arguing, among other things, that evolution worked not via Natural Selection but via Natural Cooperation, and that changes to an organism are passed down to its offspring.

That latter assertion is a version of Lamarckism, named after the 18th century French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who argued, among other things, that cutting off the tails of mice would lead them to produce tail-less offspring.

Lysenko’s concept of Natural Cooperation fueled assertions that are better described as alchemy than biology: that rye could transmute…