Merchants of Doubt

The manufactured architecture of American anti-intellectualism

There's a structural reason the American economy runs on two layers. I want to walk through that structure, because it explains something important about how distrust of expertise gets manufactured—and what happens when it succeeds.

The first layer is built by experts. Engineers design bridges that hold. Oncologists develop chemotherapy protocols that extend life. Epidemiologists track disease vectors. Regulatory scientists test whether the food you eat will kill you. This layer is boring, credentialed, and accountable. It produces things that work.

The second layer is built by people selling you things that don't work. Supplements that haven't been tested. Wellness products that contradict the evidence. Financial instruments designed to extract fees. Health claims that would collapse under peer review. This layer is exciting, populist, and unaccountable. It produces revenue.

These two layers are not independent. The second layer is parasitic on distrust of the first. And that distrust, while it has genuine cultural roots, has been deliberately manufactured—by identifiable actors, using documented strategies, for traceable financial and political gain.

This essay is an attempt to map that architecture.

Part I: The Native Vulnerability

Hofstadter's diagnosis

American anti-intellectualism isn't new. Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for tracing its roots through the entire span of American history. He defined it as a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind, and a disposition to constantly minimize its value.

But Hofstadter was precise about something that casual discussions miss. Anti-intellectualism is not a school of thought. It is a composite of related strategies used to uphold certain ideas and systems by those in power. The distinction matters. "Some people just don't trust experts" is a cultural observation. "Powerful interests actively cultivate distrust of expertise because it serves them" is a structural claim. Hofstadter was making the structural claim.

He traced the pattern through American evangelical Protestantism, which valued spiritual experience over intellectual rigor. Through the cult of the "self-made man" in business, which treated practical success as superior to theoretical knowledge. Through populist politics, which conflated expertise with elitism. Through McCarthyism, which cast intellectuals as subversive.

The pattern is always the same: an existing cultural vulnerability—the democratic instinct that no person's judgment is inherently superior to another's—gets weaponized by actors who benefit from the absence of informed scrutiny.

This is the native vulnerability. It's real, it's old, and it's not going away. But it's also not sufficient, on its own, to explain the current scale of anti-expert sentiment. Something amplified it.

The architecture of the vulnerability

Think of it in systems terms. The native anti-intellectual strain in American culture is like a membrane with a particular permeability. Under normal conditions, it allows some distrust of experts through—healthy skepticism, democratic accountability, resistance to technocratic overreach. These are features, not bugs.

But the permeability can be exploited. If you flood the system with manufactured doubt—if you create an environment where every expert claim is contested, where "both sides" framing makes settled science look like an open question—the membrane stops filtering. Everything gets through. The healthy skepticism and the manufactured confusion become indistinguishable.

That flooding has been happening, systematically, for at least seventy years. And it has a documented origin.

Part II: The Tobacco Strategy

Doubt as a product

In 1953, the presidents of America's four largest tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York with John Hill, founder of Hill and Knowlton, one of America's largest public relations firms. The meeting had one purpose: to protect their product from the mounting scientific evidence that it caused cancer.

The strategy they developed was not to prove the science wrong. That would have required actual counter-evidence. Instead, they would manufacture doubt. An internal tobacco industry memo from 1969 stated the approach explicitly: doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the minds of the general public.

This wasn't a figure of speech. It was a business model. The tobacco industry spent decades and millions of dollars creating the appearance of scientific controversy where none existed. They funded their own research—not to find truth, but to generate enough noise that the public couldn't distinguish signal from static. They hired credentialed scientists to lend legitimacy to the doubt campaign.

It worked. For over fifty years, the tobacco industry successfully delayed regulation, won court cases, and kept the public confused about whether smoking actually caused cancer. In 2006, a federal judge found the industry guilty of criminal conspiracy to defraud the American public. By then, the playbook had already been copied.

The playbook migrates

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented this migration in Merchants of Doubt. Their central finding is remarkable: the same small group of scientists who helped the tobacco industry manufacture doubt about the smoking-cancer link subsequently applied the identical strategy to acid rain, the ozone hole, and climate change.

This wasn't analogy. It was the same people, using the same methods, funded by the same network of corporations and conservative think tanks—the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute.

The strategy never changed. Don't prove the experts wrong. Just keep the controversy alive. Create enough doubt that the public thinks there's still a debate. Then use that manufactured uncertainty to block regulation.

The target changed—from tobacco to acid rain to ozone to climate—but the mechanism was identical in every case:

This is an architecture of doubt. It has components, it has a sequence of operations, and it produces a specific output: public confusion sufficient to prevent collective action.

Part III: The Parallel Economy

From doubt to revenue

The tobacco strategy was defensive. Its purpose was to protect an existing industry from regulation by attacking the scientific basis for that regulation. But the playbook proved so effective that it spawned something more ambitious: an entire parallel economy that runs on distrust of expertise.

The dietary supplement industry is the clearest example. Since the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, supplement manufacturers in the United States have not been required to demonstrate that their products are safe or effective before selling them. The FDA does not approve supplements. The industry remains largely unregulated.

The result is a $40 billion market in which, as one federal official put it, some products are nothing more than 21st-century snake oil. Studies have found recalled supplements still containing prescription drugs. An estimated 23,000 emergency room visits per year are related to dietary supplements. Companies that receive million-dollar fines treat them as a cost of doing business and continue making unsupported claims.

This industry could not exist at this scale if the public trusted the FDA, trusted peer-reviewed research, and trusted the regulatory apparatus that evaluates health claims. It thrives specifically because people have been taught—by decades of manufactured doubt—that the experts are compromised, that "natural" is inherently safer than "tested," and that institutional science serves corporate interests rather than public health.

The irony is total. The anti-expert sentiment was originally manufactured by corporations to protect their profits from regulation. That same sentiment now generates profits directly, by creating a market for products that would fail any rigorous evaluation.

The wellness-industrial complex

The supplement industry is one node in a much larger structure. The global wellness industry—supplements, alternative medicine, "clean" products, detoxes, functional foods, wellness influencing—represents over $6 trillion in annual revenue. In the United States alone, wellness spending reached roughly $2 trillion in 2023.

For context: the pharmaceutical industry—"Big Pharma," the entity that wellness culture positions as its adversary—generates approximately $500 billion annually. The wellness industry is roughly four times larger. Unlike pharmaceuticals, it faces minimal regulatory scrutiny, no requirement to demonstrate efficacy, and no obligation to report adverse events systematically.

This is not a fringe economy. This is a dominant economic force that depends, structurally, on public distrust of the evidence-based system it claims to oppose. Every dollar spent on an untested supplement because someone distrusts the FDA is a dollar that flows through the anti-expert pipeline. The pipeline has an input (manufactured doubt), a mechanism (cultural anti-intellectualism), and an output (revenue for unaccountable products).

The political economy of ignorance

The economics don't stop at consumer products. Anti-expert sentiment has direct political utility.

The current populist strategy of framing government action as "common sense" against "elite expertise" serves a specific function: it creates a permission structure for deregulation. If experts can't be trusted, their recommendations for environmental standards, financial oversight, food safety, and public health carry no weight. Regulation becomes an imposition by a discredited class rather than a protection informed by evidence.

The beneficiaries of this framing are concrete. Industries that face environmental regulation benefit when climate scientists are discredited. Financial institutions benefit when economists advocating oversight are dismissed as elitist. Supplement manufacturers benefit when the FDA is portrayed as captured or incompetent. In every case, the pattern is the same: undermine the expert, remove the regulation, capture the revenue.

And here is the structural observation that matters most: the push toward anti-intellectualism and against elites is coming from wealthy, educated elites within government and industry. The loudest voices against "the establishment" are themselves establishment figures—billionaires, Ivy League graduates, corporate executives—who benefit financially from the distrust they promote.

This is not populism. It is manufactured populism in service of economic interests. The form looks like a bottom-up revolt against credentialed authority. The architecture is top-down, funded, and strategic.

Part IV: The Amplification Stack

Foreign exploitation

If you wanted to weaken a rival nation cheaply, you would amplify its existing internal divisions. You would not need to create new conflicts—just pour accelerant on the ones already burning. Anti-expert sentiment in the United States is precisely this kind of pre-existing vulnerability, and foreign state actors have exploited it systematically.

The Department of Justice seized 32 internet domains created by the Russian government as part of an operation called Doppelganger, which used fabricated articles on fake news websites to influence American public opinion. Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state-sponsored actors have deployed troll farms, social media bots, and AI-generated content to deepen divisions around precisely the issues where expert consensus exists—public health, climate, vaccines, election integrity.

The mechanism is amplification, not creation. These actors didn't invent American anti-intellectualism. They found a system already primed by decades of corporate doubt-manufacturing and poured resources into making it worse. A population that already distrusts its own experts is trivially easy to manipulate with disinformation.

Algorithmic acceleration

Social media platforms introduced a new dynamic: manufactured doubt became self-sustaining. The algorithms that govern content visibility optimize for engagement. Outrage, fear, and controversy generate engagement. Expert consensus—by definition settled and undramatic—does not.

The result is an information architecture that structurally disadvantages expertise. A measured explanation of vaccine safety generates less engagement than a conspiracy theory about vaccine injury. A nuanced climate paper generates less sharing than a provocative denial. The algorithm doesn't have an agenda, but it has an effect: it systematically amplifies doubt and suppresses consensus.

This means the manufacturing of doubt no longer requires active funding from specific industries. The ecosystem is self-sustaining. Doubt generates engagement, engagement generates revenue for platforms, revenue incentivizes more doubt-generating content. The tobacco executives who invented the playbook in 1953 needed to spend millions maintaining their doubt campaign. Today, the campaign runs itself, funded by advertising revenue and powered by algorithmic selection pressure.

AI-generated scale

Generative AI has added a final accelerant. Content that once required human effort to produce—fake news articles, fabricated expert quotes, pseudo-scientific papers—can now be generated at scale, cheaply, and with sufficient quality to pass casual inspection. The World Economic Forum named AI-powered misinformation the top global risk over the next two years, ahead of climate change and war.

The amplification stack now looks like this:

Each layer amplifies the ones below it. The cultural substrate makes the population receptive. Corporate manufacturing creates the initial doubt. Political actors convert doubt into policy. Foreign actors deepen the divisions. Algorithms make the doubt self-sustaining. AI scales the whole operation.

Part V: The Cascade

From doubt to systemic failure

The consequences cascade through the system in a pattern that should look familiar to anyone who studies complex systems.

Stage 1: Expert credibility collapses. Decades of manufactured doubt erode public trust in scientific institutions, regulatory agencies, and credentialed professionals. The erosion is not uniform—it's concentrated in populations already predisposed by the cultural substrate—but it's sufficient to create a critical mass of distrust.

Stage 2: The parallel economy expands. As expert credibility declines, the market for unaccountable alternatives grows. Supplements, wellness products, alternative medicine, conspiracy-adjacent media, unregulated financial products—all thrive in the vacuum left by discredited expertise. This expansion is self-reinforcing: the larger the parallel economy, the more actors have financial incentives to maintain the doubt that sustains it.

Stage 3: Regulatory capture becomes possible. When enough of the public distrusts regulatory agencies, political actors can defund, restructure, or capture those agencies without electoral consequence. The appointment of figures with histories of anti-vaccine advocacy to positions overseeing public health is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a decades-long doubt campaign.

Stage 4: Institutional knowledge degrades. Agencies stripped of funding and credibility lose their capacity to function. Scientists leave. Institutional memory erodes. The ability to mount evidence-based responses to crises—pandemics, environmental disasters, financial collapses—diminishes. This degradation then becomes evidence for the anti-expert narrative: "See, the institutions don't work." The failure was engineered, but it looks organic.

Stage 5: Vulnerability to external manipulation increases. A society with degraded institutions and widespread distrust of expertise is maximally vulnerable to disinformation—from domestic actors seeking profit, from political actors seeking power, and from foreign actors seeking destabilization. The system enters a positive feedback loop: manipulation degrades trust, degraded trust enables more manipulation.

This is not a metaphor. It is a structural description of a system consuming its own institutional architecture.

Part VI: Cui Bono

Following the money

The Roman consul Lucius Cassius, regarded as one of Rome's wisest judges, had a habit of asking one question in every case: Cui bono? Who benefits?

Applied to the current architecture of anti-expert sentiment, the answers are specific:

Corporations facing regulation. The fossil fuel industry benefits when climate scientists are discredited. The tobacco industry benefited—for fifty years—when oncologists were doubted. The supplement industry benefits when the FDA is defunded. The financial industry benefits when economists advocating oversight are dismissed. Every dollar of avoided regulation is a dollar of protected revenue.

Political actors seeking deregulation. The framing of expert consensus as "elite opinion" creates political permission to dismantle regulatory structures. This benefits the donors and industries that fund the political actors making the argument. The chain is: fund the campaign → elect the candidate → deregulate the industry → capture the revenue.

The parallel economy itself. The wellness industry, the supplement industry, the alternative medicine industry, the conspiracy media industry—all generate revenue in direct proportion to public distrust of mainstream expertise. A $6.3 trillion global industry does not passively benefit from anti-expert sentiment. It actively promotes it, because its revenue depends on it.

Foreign adversaries. A fractured, distrustful population is cheaper to manipulate than a cohesive one. The cost of a troll farm is trivial compared to military expenditure. Amplifying existing domestic divisions—including distrust of expertise—is among the most cost-effective asymmetric warfare strategies available.

Content platforms. Doubt generates engagement. Engagement generates advertising revenue. Platforms are not neutral conduits; they are economic actors that profit from the controversy that doubt produces. They have no financial incentive to resolve the controversy and a strong financial incentive to sustain it.

The beneficiaries are diverse, but they converge on a single mechanism: the erosion of the public's ability to distinguish evidence-based claims from manufactured alternatives.

Part VII: The Unified Picture

Architecture determines information metabolism

The parallel to biological systems is not accidental. Just as cellular architecture determines metabolic function—as I've argued in other essays—informational architecture determines a society's capacity to process evidence and act on it.

A society with functional epistemic architecture—credible institutions, independent scientific bodies, accountable media, an educated public—can metabolize new information efficiently. Evidence flows through the system, gets evaluated, and produces appropriate responses. This is the informational equivalent of oxidative phosphorylation: high-efficiency processing of complex inputs.

A society with degraded epistemic architecture cannot do this. Evidence gets trapped in manufactured controversy. Signal becomes indistinguishable from noise. The system reverts to low-efficiency processing—tribalism, anecdote, gut feeling. This is the informational equivalent of the Warburg shift: the system abandons its high-efficiency machinery and falls back on primitive, wasteful alternatives.

The architecture is continuously consumed

Just as mitochondrial architecture is continuously damaged by the reactive oxygen species generated by normal respiration, epistemic architecture is continuously damaged by the normal operations of democratic discourse. Healthy debate, legitimate disagreement, the exposure of genuine institutional failures—these are necessary processes that also generate doubt as a byproduct.

Maintaining functional epistemic architecture requires continuous investment: funding for independent research, education in critical thinking, accountability mechanisms for media, protection for institutional independence. When that investment falls below the rate of consumption—when doubt is manufactured faster than trust can be rebuilt—the architecture degrades.

The manufactured deficit

The current situation is not a natural equilibrium. The rate of doubt production has been artificially elevated—by corporate strategy, political exploitation, foreign interference, algorithmic amplification, and AI-generated scale—far above the rate at which epistemic architecture can be maintained. The system is running a deficit.

This deficit is the structural explanation for why anti-expert sentiment feels manufactured. It is manufactured. Not entirely—the cultural substrate is real—but the amplification is deliberate, funded, and traceable. The native vulnerability of American anti-intellectualism is being exploited by actors who profit from the resulting confusion.

What I Know, What I'm Guessing, What I Don't Know

Well-grounded

• American anti-intellectualism has deep cultural roots, documented by Hofstadter and others since at least the 1950s
• The tobacco industry deliberately manufactured public doubt about the smoking-cancer link for over fifty years; this was established in federal court
• The same strategy and, in some cases, the same individuals migrated from tobacco denial to climate denial; this is documented by Oreskes, Conway, and others
• The dietary supplement industry operates with minimal regulatory oversight due to DSHEA (1994); this is a matter of law
• Foreign state actors have conducted documented disinformation campaigns targeting American public discourse; the DOJ has prosecuted specific cases
• Social media algorithms optimize for engagement, which structurally favors controversial content over consensus

Speculative but plausible

• The current anti-expert sentiment represents a qualitative escalation—not just a cyclical recurrence—due to the amplification stack described above
• The parallel economy of wellness, supplements, and alternative medicine is structurally dependent on manufactured doubt, not merely a beneficiary of it
• The convergence of corporate, political, foreign, and algorithmic interests on the same mechanism (doubt manufacturing) is producing effects greater than any single actor could achieve alone
• The cascade from doubt to institutional degradation to increased vulnerability represents a positive feedback loop that, without intervention, will continue to accelerate

Unknown

• Whether the current wave of anti-expert sentiment is reversible, or whether the epistemic architecture has been damaged past a point of recovery
• The relative contribution of each layer of the amplification stack; which layer is doing the most damage
• Whether there is a threshold effect—a level of institutional trust below which the system cannot self-correct
• What interventions, if any, can rebuild epistemic architecture faster than the current rate of degradation
• How much of the parallel economy would collapse if institutional trust were restored, versus how much has become self-sustaining independent of the doubt that created it

Why Think About This At All

A reasonable question. If the evidence base is incomplete in places, and the systemic dynamics are complex, why construct an elaborate structural analysis?

Because the framing matters. The dominant narratives about anti-intellectualism tend toward two poles: either it's a cultural failing of the uneducated (elitist and wrong), or it's a legitimate populist revolt against a compromised establishment (populist and incomplete). Both framings obscure the structural reality: that specific, identifiable actors have spent decades and billions of dollars manufacturing the doubt that now permeates American public discourse.

The "two-layer economy" is not a metaphor. There is a measurable, trillion-dollar economy that depends on people distrusting the evidence-based system. That economy has lobbyists, marketing budgets, and political allies. It actively works to maintain and deepen the distrust that sustains it. Treating anti-expert sentiment as a spontaneous cultural phenomenon—rather than a partially engineered condition with identifiable beneficiaries—misses the architecture.

The framework here doesn't produce a simple solution. Epistemic architecture, like biological architecture, degrades faster than it can be rebuilt. The amplification stack has multiple independent layers, each of which would need to be addressed separately. And the cultural substrate—the native American suspicion of intellectual authority—isn't something that can or should be eliminated; it's a feature of democratic life that has been exploited, not a defect to be corrected.

But understanding the architecture is the prerequisite for any meaningful response. You can't fix a system you don't understand. You can't address manufactured doubt by treating it as organic confusion. And you can't protect institutions you've been convinced to dismantle.

If you find yourself wanting to believe this framework because it confirms your suspicion that "they" are manipulating "us," be suspicious of yourself. The architecture of doubt is real, but so is the architecture of legitimate institutional failure. Experts have been wrong. Institutions have been captured. The pharmaceutical industry has lied. The distinction between manufactured doubt and earned distrust is not always clean, and treating all skepticism as manufactured is itself a form of the epistemic failure this essay describes.

If you find yourself dismissing this framework because it sounds like a conspiracy theory, be equally suspicious. The tobacco strategy is not a theory—it was proven in federal court. The think tank funding networks are not hidden—they're a matter of public record. The foreign disinformation campaigns are not speculation—they've been prosecuted by the Department of Justice. The architecture is documented. The question is not whether it exists but how much of the current anti-expert sentiment it explains.

The honest position is somewhere in the middle: a society with genuine cultural vulnerabilities has had those vulnerabilities deliberately amplified by actors who profit from the resulting confusion. Both the vulnerability and the amplification are real. Addressing one while ignoring the other misses the system.

That's the distinction this essay set out to explore. The American economy runs on two layers not because Americans are uniquely gullible, but because distrust of expertise is uniquely profitable—and profitability, in a market economy, creates its own architecture.