Pseudo-science in populism

As public irrationality, conspiracy theories and anti-science movements are gaining momentum we observe what Porpora (2020) refers to as the ‘crisis of truth’. It is a distrust of expertise and scientific knowledge and post-truth populism speeded with fake news. The crisis of truth refers to an era where evidence and objective facts go missing in sentiment, emotion and personal beliefs. Relying on emotions, creationism, religious beliefs and common sense over expertise, purposefully creates a counter knowledge referred as pseudo-science (Dawes 2018), troll-science (Eslen-Ziya 2020) or fake-science (Edis 2020). It is projected politically and ideologically charged alternative knowledge and has changed the way science and experts used to inform political decision making. As the worth of scientific expertise is devalued, the counter scientific discourses supported through right-wing political rhetoric help produce not only a culture of resistance to science, but also create new grounds for digital populism and pseudo-science. In this paper I seek to explore how the development of counter knowledge serves as a catalyser of producing and disseminating public sentiments on populist discourses