Margaret Thatcher once said, “Power is like being a lady …if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” This makes it quite curious that Fox News’ slogan is, “The Most Powerful Name in News.”

It’s also quite curious that Conservapedia, obviously a conservative encyclopedia, hails itself as “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia.” If you must attempt to confirm yourself as trustworthy, you probably aren’t.

Why then has this encyclopedia, a factually impaired partisan attempt to pander to the far right, received 350 million views? The views can’t all come from people like me looking for a good laugh, though I’m sure a sizeable amount have.

Rather, the views come from the intended audience. Conservatives looking for the ideological validation that Fox News just can’t give them, no matter how hard it might try. With its embarrassing lack of facts and scientific distortion, it’s no wonder that conservatives’ trust of science is at an all time low.

Conservapedia was developed as a response to the evil, radical, left-wing propaganda machine, Wikipedia. Right-wingers, apparently unsatisfied with Limbaugh and friends on talk radio, Hannity and O’Reilly on Fox News and their “Think” Tank the Heritage Foundation, needed their own encyclopedia to boot.

Global warming, evolution (micro or macro), homosexuality and even the theory of relativity are fiercely rejected by Conservapedia. E=MC^2 is described on Conservapedia as “a liberal claptrap.” That may be a bit further than Faux News normally takes their coverage of science, but their wild rejections of global warming are consistent with each other.

Sadly, the start of conservative’s negative view of science started some time ago. Gordan Gauchat of UNC Chapel Hill provides data from 1974-2010 tracking conservative’s trust in science and its steady decline, reporting it today at an all time low, well below that of liberals.

So much has the decline of trust spread through the Republican ranks that former GOP presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman shocked the world when he tweeted a response to Rick Perry’s anti-evolution speech. “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy,” Huntsman tweeted. He gained 4,000 new followers that day alone.

The data and research is there in regard to conservatives’ distrust of science. Trying to explain why is a more difficult task. Some researchers in Social Psychology Quarterly say that conservatives reject things that are “evolutionarily novel.” Maybe it’s as simple as conservatives rejecting change or breaking from habit as NYU’s David Amodio suggests in his research.

Any way you look at it, graduate degrees are becoming more numerous among liberals than conservatives, according to Gauchat. A Pew Research Center Poll from 2009 found that only 6 percent of scientists label themselves as Republican. With the general distaste for elitist academics prevalent among the Republican base, it becomes easier to see where the negative view comes from.

Keeping in mind the findings above, look at the impact manmade global warming would have on the bottom lines of pollution ridden industries like coal, oil and manufacturing. Piece by piece the picture becomes clearer as to why science is being cast aside by the Party of Business, aka the GOP.

This could have serious consequences, though. Less diversity in the scientific community could produce weaker outcomes. Less motivation from teachers and less ambition from students could result in untold losses of scientific potential. Tack on a populous less than eager to celebrate galvanizing findings and there you have it — an America severely different than the one that sent a man to the moon.

One might wonder why these mediums feel it necessary to distort the truth and by extension science, for their selfish partisan purposes. The answer might simply lie within a quote by Stephen Colbert, in which he states, “Reality has a well known liberal bias.” What do you do if the reality in which you live doesn’t contain your ideals? Lie. And as Joseph Goebbels put it, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”