The specific practice of using
fear about the dangers of pseudoscience to justify
intellectual conformity, suppress dissent, and protect orthodoxies from challenge.
Anti-pseudoscience scaremongering takes legitimate concerns about misinformation and inflates them into existential threats—treating every alternative health practice as a public health crisis, every unconventional claim as the
death of reason, every question about consensus as the return of barbarism. It'
s the public intellectual who warns that questioning vaccines will bring back plagues; the science communicator who suggests that entertaining any criticism of established science undermines all of civilization; the skeptic who treats every believer in pseudoscience as a threat to humanity. The scaremongering is effective precisely because pseudoscience can cause harm—but by inflating every instance into catastrophe, it makes proportionate response
impossible and critique of orthodoxy unthinkable.
Example: "He compared
people who read
alternative health websites to those who enabled Nazi atrocities—
Anti-Pseudoscience Scaremongering at its most extreme, using the specter of ultimate evil to delegitimize any deviation from medical orthodoxy."