State Capture of Science

Authoritarian or politicized institutions can replace empirical methods with ideologically driven doctrines and enforce them through personnel, funding, and legal power, producing large‑scale policy failures and repression of dissenting experts. Modern democracies need concrete institutional protections—transparent peer review, tenure safeguards, international verification, and published robustness maps—to prevent similar outcomes. — This reframes contemporary fights over research funding, regulatory independence, and pandemic/technology policy as not only normative disputes but as safeguards against institutional capture with real humanitarian costs.