{"id":188102,"date":"2026-05-17T17:36:01","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T01:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=188102"},"modified":"2026-05-17T17:57:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T01:57:27","slug":"michael-fumento-and-the-career-of-the-empiricist-dissenter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=188102","title":{"rendered":"Michael Fumento and the Career of the Empiricist Dissenter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Fumento<\/a> (b. 1949) belongs to a distinct generation of American journalists who fused investigative reporting with policy polemic, epidemiological skepticism, and technological advocacy. Over four decades he cultivated the role of empiricist dissenter, positioning his work against media-amplified moral panics, institutional orthodoxies, and emotionally satisfying public narratives. His trajectory traversed conservative think tanks, mainstream newspaper syndication, war correspondence, biotechnology advocacy, and later digital marginality. He serves as a case study in the transformation of American authority structures from the centralized prestige media world of the late Cold War to the fragmented information ecosystem of the twenty-first century.
\nFumento came of age during the social and political upheavals of postwar America. Raised within American Catholicism, he entered adulthood during the Vietnam era, a period that destabilized confidence in government, expertise, and national consensus. He pursued legal studies before turning to journalism, and he carried with him many of the habits of adversarial legal reasoning. His prose retained a prosecutorial structure throughout his career. He identified a dominant public narrative, isolated its weakest empirical premises, cross-examined statistical claims, and tried to show that emotional consensus had overwhelmed evidentiary discipline.
\nHis early rise occurred within the expanding ecosystem of conservative journalism during the Reagan era. He wrote for National Review, The American Spectator, and a range of syndicated newspaper outlets. He never fit comfortably within movement conservatism in the conventional sense. He lacked the theological orientation of the religious right and showed little attachment to populist nationalism or traditionalist cultural conservatism. His worldview reflected a form of technocratic libertarian empiricism shaped by confidence in quantitative analysis, suspicion toward media sensationalism, and belief in the emancipatory potential of scientific and technological innovation.
\nThe institutional center of gravity for much of his career became Hudson Institute, where he served as a senior fellow during the 1990s and early 2000s. Hudson during this period functioned as a principal intellectual incubator for post-Cold War techno-optimism. It championed free-market globalization, military modernization, biotechnology, agricultural innovation, and skepticism toward environmental alarmism. Within this milieu, his transition from AIDS contrarianism to full-spectrum defense of biotechnology and industrial modernity becomes intelligible.
\nAt Hudson, he operated alongside futurists, policy analysts, defense intellectuals, and market-oriented technocrats who viewed technological progress as both economically necessary and morally desirable. The setting reinforced his tendency to read many public controversies as expressions of irrational fear systems obstructing scientific advancement. He framed environmental activism, anti-GMO politics, and public-health panics as secularized forms of apocalyptic thinking. Advanced industrial society, in his telling, faced repeated obstruction by media systems and activist coalitions that transformed low-probability risks into existential moral crises.
\nFumento first achieved national notoriety through the AIDS debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Public officials, advocacy groups, journalists, and medical authorities warned of a generalized heterosexual epidemic in the United States. He challenged these claims in his 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS. Drawing on epidemiological data, he argued that the American epidemic remained concentrated among homosexual men and intravenous drug users, and that public-health messaging had exaggerated the risks of widespread heterosexual transmission.
\nThe book placed him at the center of a bitter national controversy. Activists accused him of minimizing a deadly epidemic and legitimizing indifference toward marginalized populations. Critics portrayed the work as part of a broader conservative backlash against gay activism and public-health mobilization. Supporters argued that many of his statistical claims turned out to be substantially correct within the American context. The generalized heterosexual epidemic predicted by some early forecasts did not materialize in the United States at the scale initially feared.
\nThe significance of the episode extends beyond the epidemiological dispute. It set the interpretive template for the rest of his career. Again and again, he entered domains where scientific uncertainty intersected with media incentives, bureaucratic expansion, activist mobilization, and public fear. In each case, he cast himself as the defender of empirical proportionality against emotional escalation.
\nThe pattern recurred in his writing on environmental risk, toxicology, consumer safety, and military health controversies. He became a visible American critic of what he termed “junk science,” and he argued that journalists and activists routinely confused correlation with causation, elevated anecdotal suffering into generalized proof, and ignored population-level statistical reasoning. He attacked fears about pesticides, food contamination, breast implants, chemical exposure, and pharmaceutical risk.
\nFumento belonged to a broader late twentieth-century tradition of risk skepticism associated with figures such as Aaron Wildavsky (1930-1993) and market-oriented science writers who challenged precautionary politics. Unlike many libertarian anti-regulatory polemicists, he did not reject expertise as such. He distinguished between what he regarded as legitimate scientific expertise and the politicization of expertise through litigation incentives, activist pressure, media sensationalism, and bureaucratic self-interest.
\nThe distinction surfaced again during debates over Gulf War Syndrome after the 1991 Gulf War. Thousands of veterans reported chronic symptoms attributed to chemical agents, vaccines, battlefield toxins, or environmental exposure. He investigated these claims and concluded that the evidence for a unified toxicological syndrome was weak. He argued that stress responses, psychosomatic processes, diagnostic inflation, and media contagion better explained the phenomenon than large-scale chemical poisoning.
\nThe position generated intense hostility once again. Portions of the veteran community and populist conservatives viewed his work as dismissive and technocratic. From his own perspective, the case represented another example of institutional panic overwhelming evidentiary discipline. He argued that modern societies have strong incentives to medicalize diffuse suffering into politically legible syndromes because doing so mobilizes sympathy, funding, and institutional authority.
\nBy the late 1990s and early 2000s, biotechnology became the central focus of his work. His 2003 book BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World offered the fullest articulation of his positive civilizational vision. The book argued that genetic engineering, cloning, pharmaceutical innovation, and agricultural biotechnology serve as engines of human progress. Opposition to genetically modified organisms, in his view, reflected a quasi-religious anti-modernism rooted less in scientific evidence than in symbolic fears about industrial society and corporate power.
\nHe presented biotechnology as a humanitarian necessity capable of raising agricultural productivity, reducing malnutrition, and improving global public health. He accused environmental activists of sacrificing scientific advancement to romanticized visions of untouched nature. The argument placed him firmly within a coalition of pro-market technocrats, agribusiness advocates, and modernization theorists who treated environmental precaution as an obstacle to development.
\nThe alignment produced the greatest crisis of his career. In 2006, revelations emerged that he had accepted financial support connected to Monsanto while writing favorably about genetically modified crops and biotechnology, and he had not disclosed the relationship in his syndicated columns. Hudson Institute had also received Monsanto-related funding.
\nThe consequences were immediate. Scripps Howard News Service terminated his nationally syndicated column, ending his mainstream newspaper distribution. Hudson soon severed ties with him as well. The scandal damaged his institutional credibility and transformed his public position from establishment-affiliated contrarian into increasingly isolated outsider.
\nThe episode revealed a structural tension embedded within the contrarian-expert model. Dissident intellectuals who challenge dominant institutional narratives often depend on alternative funding sources because mainstream organizations turn hostile to them. Yet dependence on those sources weakens claims to detached independence. The result is recurring instability. If the contrarian stays entirely independent, he risks economic marginalization. If he accepts institutional support, critics reinterpret his dissent as covert advocacy.
\nThe Monsanto controversy therefore amounted to more than a disclosure scandal. It marked the collapse of his capacity to inhabit the role of neutral empirical skeptic within mainstream journalism. After 2006, his career migrated steadily toward self-publishing, personal websites, blogs, niche conservative media, and digitally fragmented audiences.
\nThe shift mirrored larger structural transformations within American journalism. He began his career during the age of centralized newspaper syndication, when public intellectuals operated inside relatively unified institutional frameworks. By the 2010s and 2020s, those structures had fragmented into rival information ecosystems defined by ideological mistrust. Figures excluded from prestige media often built parallel digital audiences rooted in anti-establishment identity.
\nHis later work on pandemic fears shows the continuity of his method across decades. During the mid-2000s, he became an outspoken critic of alarm surrounding H5N1 avian influenza and the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak. He mocked catastrophic mortality projections and argued that the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had institutional incentives to amplify fear, to secure funding, public authority, and political relevance.
\nWhen these outbreaks failed to produce the mortality figures some experts predicted, he treated the outcomes as confirmation of his broader thesis about the political economy of panic. He argued that modern bureaucracies and media systems reward worst-case scenarios because fear generates audience attention, institutional legitimacy, and emergency powers.
\nThe same framework reappeared almost unchanged during the COVID-19 pandemic. He became an aggressive critic of lockdowns, masking mandates, catastrophic mortality modeling, and what he regarded as algorithmically amplified panic. He argued that the pandemic response represented the culmination of trends he had spent decades attacking: predictive modeling transformed into moralized certainty, bureaucratic expansion justified through emergency rhetoric, and dissent treated as socially dangerous.
\nTo supporters, COVID vindicated many of his longstanding critiques about fear amplification and institutional overreach. To critics, it showed the dangers of reflexive contrarianism and the inability of some skeptics to recognize large-scale threats. Whatever one’s assessment, the pandemic confirmed the consistency of his intellectual style. The same interpretive structure visible in The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS reappeared almost identically thirty years later in his COVID commentary.
\nStylistically, Fumento represents a fading model of argumentative journalism rooted in the pre-digital era. His writing bristles with statistics, epidemiological references, adversarial questioning, and prosecutorial logic. Unlike many contemporary commentators who foreground personal narrative or moral self-positioning, he emphasizes evidentiary confrontation. His essays often read like legal briefs directed against institutional irrationality.
\nHis career also exposes the limits of purely technocratic discourse within democratic mass society. Public controversies rarely operate through data alone. They turn on symbolic meaning, moral recognition, coalition-building, institutional trust, and emotional identification. He often approached disputes as though statistical clarification might dissolve political conflict. Modern media systems reward narratives that translate diffuse anxieties into emotionally legible forms. Fear persists not merely because populations misunderstand data but because fear performs social and institutional functions.
\nHis trajectory also illustrates the psychological and institutional hazards of permanent dissidence. Intellectuals who repeatedly define themselves against consensus can eventually become attached to outsider status. Marginality becomes not merely a condition but an identity. Critics argued that he increasingly inhabited this position in his later years, reading exclusion from mainstream institutions as proof of epistemic integrity.
\nHis importance within American intellectual history remains substantial. He anticipated many later conflicts over expertise, media incentives, algorithmic panic, and the politicization of science. Long before debates over social-media misinformation or pandemic governance became central features of public life, he argued that modern information systems magnify catastrophic narratives because crises generate institutional rewards.
\nHis career therefore functions as more than the biography of a controversial journalist. It serves as a lens through which to view the transformation of American authority structures over four decades. He began in a world where empirical disputes unfolded within relatively shared institutional frameworks and ended in a world where credibility had become factionalized and where rival media ecosystems operated with radically different assumptions about expertise, legitimacy, and truth.
\nMichael Fumento occupies a revealing place in the history of late modern American journalism. He embodies the promise and the peril of the empiricist contrarian. He shows how statistical skepticism can expose institutional exaggeration and media distortion. He also shows how hard it becomes for dissident expertise to keep its legitimacy once trust in institutions fragments and once every challenge to consensus gets read through the lens of hidden patronage, ideological warfare, and reputational struggle.<\/p>\n

Turner on Expertise<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Stephen Turner (b. 1951) spent his career<\/a> on a single problem: how technical authority survives in a democracy<\/a> that has lost confidence in technical authority<\/a>. His answer reframes expertise as a social and discursive achievement rather than a property of knowing things. An expert is a man whose claims a recognized public takes seriously. Knowing what is true and counting as someone who knows what is true are different conditions, and they come apart often. Fumento’s career maps the gap between them.
\nTurner distinguishes between expertise as cognitive content and the social conditions that license it. Universities, journals, professional associations, prestige media, and funding bodies form the apparatus through which a population recognizes some men as authoritative speakers on questions the population cannot adjudicate for itself. Without that apparatus, an argument may persist but stops counting as expert speech. The apparatus is the expert’s habitat and his vulnerability. Lose access to it and the same arguments that earned him standing yesterday become the ravings of a marginal crank today, regardless of their epistemic merit.
\nFumento entered the apparatus through three doors. He wrote for syndicated newspapers, which conferred the institutional license of mainstream journalism. He held a senior fellowship at Hudson Institute, which conferred the institutional license of policy expertise. He drew on epidemiological data and adversarial legal reasoning, which gave his prose the surface markers of evidentiary authority. None of these three licenses rested on his own scientific credentials. He had not run experiments, conducted clinical trials, or published in peer-reviewed journals. He had no independent scientific authority. He stood as the broker who translated the work of credentialed scientists into adversarial public argument against rival brokers who translated the same work in the opposite direction.
\nTurner’s central insight is that the broker position is the most exposed position in the expert ecology. A working scientist with a chair at Harvard can absorb a fall in public reputation because the cognitive apparatus continues to license him from inside. A broker has no such cushion. He depends on the willingness of editors, fellowship boards, and donors to keep granting him the platform from which his arguments register as expertise. Withdraw the platform and the man is left holding the same opinions but without the social conditions that made the opinions count.
\nThe AIDS book demonstrates the upside of the broker position. Fumento drew on credentialed epidemiology, attacked the prevailing public-health story, and his arguments turned out substantially correct in the American context. The credentialed epidemiologists themselves rarely entered the public dispute at that pitch. He occupied the broker slot they vacated and earned the standing that came with it. The arrangement worked because the institutional apparatus around him, Hudson, Scripps Howard, conservative magazines, granted him licensing the credentialed scientists could not be bothered to claim for themselves.
\nThe biotechnology turn extended the same arrangement. He took up another science-versus-panic posture, found credentialed allies in agricultural research, found patrons in the biotech industry, and entered the GMO debate as the broker who carried the modernist case into newspaper columns. His arguments may have been epistemically sound. Turner’s frame is indifferent on that question. Turner’s analysis attends to the structure of the arrangement, not its truth content. Fumento was the discursive interface between an industry seeking favorable coverage and a reading public that took syndicated columns to be independent commentary. The arrangement depended on the public not knowing the underlying patronage relations.
\nThe 2006 revelations collapsed the arrangement in a single move. Turner’s diagnosis explains why the collapse was total and irreversible. The disclosure did not falsify any of Fumento’s arguments about biotechnology. It did not show his epidemiology was wrong. It did something more lethal in Turner’s terms. It exposed the patronage relation that the discursive license had concealed, and once exposed, the license could not be reissued. Scripps Howard’s termination and Hudson’s separation are not personal repudiations. They are the apparatus reasserting the boundary between licensed expertise and concealed advocacy. The apparatus needs that boundary to retain its own credibility. A syndicate that keeps an undisclosed industry-funded columnist on its roster damages itself. The institutional rationality of the decision is what Turner’s frame predicts.
\nThe deeper trouble, for Fumento and for the case Turner makes, is that the line between licensed expertise and concealed advocacy is far less clear than the post-2006 punishments imply. Hudson Institute exists in part to translate donor preferences into policy argument. Scripps Howard ran columnists whose views correlated with the commercial interests of their patrons throughout the period. Most policy expertise in Washington runs on the machinery Fumento ran on. The system punishes the disclosed instance because that is the boundary the system can afford to police. The undisclosed normal case proceeds undisturbed.
\nThe post-2006 career is the case Turner uses to describe what happens to a broker who loses the apparatus. The arguments persist. The output continues. Fumento moves to self-publication, personal websites, and niche conservative outlets. The same prosecutorial method that produced standing inside the syndicated system produces marginality outside it. He is right or wrong on the science at roughly the same rate as before. The change is not cognitive. The change is discursive. The publics that once received him as an expert no longer receive him at all, and the publics that do receive him are too small and too factional to count as the public his earlier career addressed.
\nHis pandemic commentary illustrates the terminal condition. On H5N1, H1N1, and COVID he repeats the method that made him famous. He attacks projection models, mocks bureaucratic incentives, and predicts that catastrophe will not arrive on the scale officials warn. On the first two outbreaks the predictions hold up. On COVID his accuracy is more contested, but the central trouble in Turner’s frame is not accuracy. The trouble is that no licensing apparatus exists to convert any of his predictions into expert speech in the unitary public sphere. Even when he is right, he is right before an audience that the mainstream public-health discourse does not register as a relevant audience. His critics inside that discourse can ignore him. His allies outside it can celebrate him. Neither response brings him back inside the apparatus, and the apparatus is the condition Turner identifies for expert standing.
\nThe expert civil war Turner anticipated arrives in full visibility during COVID. The pandemic produces rival licensing systems, each with its own credentialed scientists, its own brokers, its own media outlets, and its own publics. Fumento sits on one side of that war as a senior broker for a smaller, anti-establishment apparatus. He retains expert standing inside it. He has none outside it. The Cold War unitary expert sphere that gave his AIDS book its purchase no longer exists.
\nTurner’s frame explains the arc with a precision few other accounts can match. The career is not the story of a brave dissenter punished for telling truths the establishment hated, though Fumento’s allies tell it that way. It is also not the story of a corrupted hack revealed at last, though his critics tell it that way. It is the story of a broker whose discursive license depended on social conditions he did not control, whose conditions changed under him, and whose method went on producing the same outputs after the conditions of their reception had collapsed. Turner’s contribution is to make the arc legible as a structural phenomenon rather than a moral parable. Fumento’s case is among the cleanest illustrations of the diagnosis the literature offers.<\/p>\n

Alliance Theory<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Alliance Theory, as David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton present it, treats political belief systems as patchwork narratives that mobilize support for one’s allies and opposition to one’s rivals. Beliefs do not derive from coherent abstract values. They derive from coalition positions. Partisans support their allies through three classes of propagandistic biases: perpetrator biases that minimize allies’ transgressions, victim biases that embellish allies’ grievances, and attributional biases that credit allies’ advantages to internal virtue and explain their disadvantages by external circumstance. The biases are symmetrical across left and right. What changes across the political spectrum is the identity of the allies, not the cognitive apparatus that defends them. Applied to Michael Fumento, the theory reads his career as a sequence of coalition positions, each generating its own propagandistic outputs, and his 2006 collapse as an exposure of the coalition logic his prose had worked to conceal.
\nFumento’s first coalition position emerges in the AIDS controversy. The coalition warning of a generalized heterosexual epidemic included public-health officials, gay rights advocates, mainstream journalists, and a large section of the medical establishment. His coalition against the warning placed him alongside conservative media, religious traditionalists wary of gay rights mobilization, Hudson Institute and its donors, and a smaller group of dissident epidemiologists. Alliance Theory predicts that each coalition’s beliefs will track its allies. The AIDS-warning coalition embellished the threat because the threat mobilized funding, sympathy, and policy concessions for its allied groups. Fumento’s coalition minimized the threat because minimization deflated the political claims of rival groups. The arguments on both sides may have varied in empirical merit. Alliance Theory does not adjudicate that question. The theory predicts that the arguments will track coalition position regardless of empirical merit, and the prediction holds in the AIDS case.
\nThe propagandistic biases come through in detail. Perpetrator biases work both ways. The AIDS-warning coalition treated public-health officials as competent professionals struggling against bureaucratic underfunding, never as perpetrators of moral panic. Fumento’s coalition treated the same officials as perpetrators inflating data to expand bureaucratic reach, never as well-intentioned analysts working with limited information. Victim biases run the same logic. The AIDS-warning coalition presented gay men and intravenous drug users as the moral center of the crisis. Fumento’s coalition presented the general American population as victims of false alarms that diverted resources from real threats. Attributional biases close the circle. The AIDS-warning coalition credited public-health alarms to scientific rigor and moral seriousness. Fumento’s coalition credited the alarms to bureaucratic self-interest and activist propaganda. Each side read the same events through opposite attribution patterns. Neither side was doing the cognitive work that an abstract moral principle might require. Both were running coalition defense.
\nThe biotechnology arc shows the theory’s reach. Fumento switches coalitions again, or rather joins a different cluster within the broader right. His biotechnology coalition includes agribusiness firms such as Monsanto, Hudson’s donor base, modernization economists, and the food-industry policy network. His rivals are environmentalists, organic food advocates, anti-globalization activists, and elements of the European regulatory establishment. The propagandistic outputs match the coalition. Perpetrator biases acquit Monsanto of harm and convict GMO opponents of obstructionism. Victim biases present biotech firms as innovators punished by superstition and farmers in developing countries as denied yield gains by Western activists. Attributional biases credit biotech advances to scientific genius and corporate investment, and credit anti-biotech politics to ignorance and symbolic anxiety. The arguments may again have varied in empirical merit. Alliance Theory predicts coalition fit regardless of merit, and the fit holds.
\nThe 2006 Monsanto disclosure is the moment Alliance Theory accounts for with economy. The patronage relation between Fumento and Monsanto did not change his propagandistic outputs. The outputs had already tracked the coalition for years. What changed was the legibility of the patronage to outside observers. Once the patronage was visible, the propagandistic biases became visible as such, and the claim to neutral empirical analysis collapsed. Inside the coalition, the disclosure was a betrayal of the optics the coalition needed to keep. Outside the coalition, the disclosure confirmed what rivals had alleged all along: that the arguments were coalition products, not independent science. Both responses are themselves coalition moves. The center-right coalition expelled Fumento to protect the appearance of editorial independence the broader coalition depended on. The center-left coalition celebrated the expulsion to delegitimize the larger network of pro-industry science writing. The episode is not the story of one corrupt journalist. It is a coalition-maintenance event playing out on both sides.
\nAfter 2006, Fumento moves into a new coalition position. He joins the emerging anti-establishment right, an alliance that combines libertarian risk skeptics, conservative populists, vaccine critics, lockdown opponents, and figures pushed out of mainstream credentialing. His arguments do not change. The same prosecutorial method against institutional panic returns in his H5N1, H1N1, and COVID commentary. The coalition shifts under him. His earlier coalition needed a Hudson-syndicated voice attacking junk science from inside the institutional center. His later coalition needs an outsider attacking institutional science from beyond the credentialing apparatus. He serves both coalitions with much the same prose. The Alliance Theory point is that the prose was never the independent product his earlier coalition needed it to appear to be. The prose was always coalition output. The 2006 disclosure shifted which coalition could use it.
\nStrange bedfellows show up across his career. In the AIDS debate he stood with religious traditionalists who otherwise distrusted scientific naturalism. In the biotech debate he stood with progressive agricultural development advocates who otherwise distrusted corporate power. In the COVID period he stood with anti-vaccine populists and libertarians who otherwise diverged on most questions. Each coalition is a patchwork. Each patchwork serves a temporary alignment of interests against a common rival. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton predict this: coalitions form through similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, not through shared first principles. Fumento’s allies need only share his rivals. That is enough to hold a coalition together long enough to produce propaganda against the shared target.
\nThe theory’s symmetry assumption protects against unfair reading. Alliance Theory does not treat Fumento as uniquely corrupt or uniquely loyal. Every public commentator runs coalition propaganda. The Hudson policy expert and the Berkeley environmental scientist both produce coalition output, dressed in different institutional vestments. Visible patronage makes Fumento a clean case. Most coalition propaganda runs without that visibility, and runs harder because of it. The theory reads him as a representative specimen, not as an exceptional villain. His career is a normal coalition career in a fragmented information ecosystem. The pre-2006 phase shows the coalition operating with its patronage relations obscured. The post-2006 phase shows the coalition operating with patronage relations exposed. The propagandistic biases run the same on both sides of the disclosure. Only the coalition’s optics change.
\nIf propagandistic biases are symmetrical, and if coalition propaganda is the normal output of political commentary, then by what standard can a reader distinguish the more accurate coalition output from the less accurate? Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton do not answer this question. Alliance Theory is descriptive, not normative. It explains how belief systems form. It does not tell the reader how to weigh competing coalition products against external reality. Fumento’s case sharpens the question because his AIDS claims look closer to the American epidemiological record in retrospect than his rivals’ claims did, while his biotech and COVID claims sit in more contested empirical territory. The theory predicts the structure of his arguments. The structure does not predict their accuracy. Some coalition outputs are closer to reality than others, and the theory has nothing to say about which.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Fumento (b. 1949) belongs to a distinct generation of American journalists who fused investigative reporting with policy polemic, epidemiological skepticism, and technological advocacy. Over four decades he cultivated the role of empiricist dissenter, positioning his work against media-amplified moral … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29570],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-michael-fumento-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t