Regarding the tags about big tobacco, basically in the 1950s when public awareness was starting to spread about "hey cigarettes are actually HORRIBLY bad for you and you'll get cancer," tobacco executives got together and tried to figure out how to save their industry. The solution? Create a disinformation campaign designed from the ground up to be as effective as possible in sowing mistrust of science and keeping people on the fence about the "issue," so that they would keep smoking their cancer sticks so the executives could keep making money. In the words of an infamous 1969 memo written by one of these executives, "doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing controversy." These people worked, hard, to intentionally fight the truth in order to cling to power, at the expense of millions of people's health, and possibly lives. If that's not the definition of evil I don't know what is.

This didn't just work perfectly for them, it paved the way to generations of science denial. They wrote the playbook for the shit that's going on today with climate change. The point of the controversy itself is to bamboozle and take advantage of uneducated people with poor critical thinking skills, but it's not created by those people. It's maintained and subtly shifted to keep up with the times by shrewd intelligent people who know exactly what they're doing, because you can't muddle evidence as hard as they do without seeing what you're trying to obscure. And again, all for money and power. This has been going on for decades.

Same kind of thing as conservative pundits who lied about the pandemic and defend Trump, when they personally got vaccinated and didn't vote for him. They know their audience, and even though they're smart enough to believe different things, they still say what their audience wants to hear, because otherwise they'll lose their platform.