Culture, education, justice, information, science… Syndeac, the national union of arts and culture companies, is holding a series of debates in 2025 to highlight the role and importance of public services in society. A series of events in which Libération is a partner. The next debate, “Information, science and conspiracy,” November 24 in Nancy.
Cross out the word “climate change“, “climate“, “decarbonization“, “Green” Or “energy transition” – but also “woman” And “LGBT»: these are some of the terms banned by the Trump administration since taking office last January. His dizziness became even more pronounced when he read a letter from the acting director of the Department of Energy urging his subordinates to stop using this vocabulary: “Please make sure everyone on your team is aware that this is the ultimate list of words to avoid“.
There “latest list» words to be avoided, as an announcement that this stubborn war being waged against knowledge has only just begun and that the fronts will move, according to the wishes of the American government. How can we continue to provide information, under these conditions, and how can we hold a public discourse about reality when words disappear to describe it? The link between science, information and conspiracy will be at the heart of a debate hosted by the National Union of Arts and Culture Enterprises (Syndeac), in collaboration with freeat the Théâtre de la Manufacture in Nancy, this Monday, November 24.
On closer inspection, this list of forbidden words is surprising, because it was part of a strategy of obscurantism so crude that it seems unthinkable today. You’d have to be George Orwell and want to fight a triumphant war against totalitarianism at the end of the Second World War to imagine a Ministry of Censorship 1984who rewrote the same post overnight, removing the names of those shamed. We imagine that after the fall of paranoid dictatorships and the democratization of the means of access to information, the means of manipulating the truth must have become more refined.
At the same time that Orwell was laying the foundations for these crude and totalitarian techniques of disinformation, a handful of communicators were devising subtler strategies, more suited to liberal societies. Their authorship is often traced back to Edward Bernays, the writer Propaganda (1928) and is considered the father of political propaganda and public relations. One of the key concepts in the construction of this clever lie is the smoking technique, a perfect example of which is – this cannot be invented – the tobacco industry. For more than forty years, cigarette manufacturers produced bogus research, paid doctors to encourage cigarette use and touted the safety of nicotine, spending research and development dollars on a massive scale not to advance knowledge, but rather ignorance. A scientific discipline has even been created to study this organized production of doubt: agnotology.
Another obfuscation strategy, denounced by opponents of macronism since Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term in office, is the use of “Newspaper talk» neoliberal. The idea here was also taken up by George Orwell: this news speech would be proposed by the government in such a way that there would be a word denoting the opposite, “victory” and “defeat” being synonymous. This is the thesis formulated by political scientist and streamer Clément Viktorovitch in Logocracy (Seuil, 2025), when he uses a term formulated in the 19th century to refer to “the government of words”. “Logocracy is the practice of power in which people feel hampered in their ability to make decisions by people who, having mastered the official word, have also acquired and decided to use that power to enforce their word against reality.», wrote Clement Viktorovitch. How to organize politically when layoffs become “employment protection plan“, or we praise”flexibility» to show worker vulnerability?
More insidious disinformation techniques have emerged with the rise of social networks and influencers: “The new horizon in scientific lobbying is ordinary citizens, micro-influencers (…). Turning into a field relay, it broadcasts arguments designed and shaped by others», analysis of journalists Stéphane Foucart and Stéphane Horel, and sociologist Sylvains Laurens, in Guardian of reason (Discovery, 2020). Journalists reveal that there are communication institutions that allow scientific untruths to be spread by YouTubers who present themselves as defenders of the scientific spirit. A breach has even been exposed on the part of “zeteticians”, those who claim to be defenders of critical thinking, who, in the name of methodical doubt, sometimes slip into pure and simple conspiracyism.
Donald Trump’s return to business on the other side of the Atlantic clearly shows one thing: to fight science, in the end, it is not necessary to exert so much ingenuity, it is enough to dust off the chainsaw and proceed with force.
