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I would say you're not entirely right - but you're not wrong either. I don't know where exactly the genuine belief in truth ends and the "get the outgroup" begins, but somewhere along the line it turned into that. I don't think it started that way. I think that in the early 20th century, the people who were fighting for evolution to be taught (at great social risk, I might add) were doing it because they genuinely believed that it was the truth and it was important. Otherwise they wouldn't have been willing to risk the costs they did. But by the time you get to the early 21st century, I think it was 90% dunking on the outgroup. Like yeah Richard Dawkins may believe he's fighting a genuine battle for truth (as much as he was an insufferable cock about it), but he was in the minority of his faction. Most were smug internet posters going "haha young earth creationists are so dumb, am I right guys!?".
My great-grandfather was a blue tribe geologist who volunteered to be a science witness in the Scopes Trial, and my grandmother (blue tribe) had many books about it. One anecdote which always struck me was that the Yankee reporters expected to find drooling hicks raving about it all over town, but when they got to that little town they found folk with knowledge of Hebrew and Greek who put forth reasoned arguments in calm tones.
And this still regularly happens- creation scientists are polite, literate, retired petroleum geologists with political views that are much calmer than the median extremist.
And when they were gainfully employed petroleum geologists, they did petroleum geology based on the assumption that earth is 4.6 billion years old and the geological column (including fossils) was laid down the way the heathen textbooks say it was. Otherwise they wouldn't have been very good petroleum geologists. Their commitment to creation science is entirely performative.
The fact that the oil and gas industry is politically aligned with people who claim to reject modern geology for biblical reasons is hilariously funny, but significantly less shocking than, say, Churchill ending up politically aligned with Stalin.
This also goes to the point that Brett Devereaux of acoup.blog is repeatedly making - people in the past generally believed their own religion. In the early 21st century, when you don't need to believe in the supernatural in order to make sense of the world, most intelligent people do not actually believe in religion, and the occasional person who appears to is widely assumed to be lying or crazy.
I mean, it says something about their commitment that their models come much closer to explaining modern geology through a global flood than they do to explaining modern biology through a literal garden of Eden, which is the opposite of what you would expect from grifters.
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The early 21st century stuff is what I lived through, and I took it seriously when I was happening because I was in the fifth grade and thought the Flying Spaghetti Monster was the greatest comic invention ever. I wasn't even thinking about the Scopes trial as I wrote my post. I should've expanded my frame of reference while writing.
Still, my point stands. There were efforts to get intelligent design taught in schools in the 00's, which were defeated by the left, because they.. cared about the truth? Or because they cared about stomping on the right?
I believed the former at the time. Experience beat knowledge that it is the latter into me.
I've come to learn no political endeavor is ever driven by truth because the nature of power makes it impossible to pursue it and truth at the same time.
Truth is just so very scared of Power that she will vanish and have herself replaced by her sister Dogma at the slightest whiff of Power showing up. Which is why she famously never attends wars, let alone politics in general.
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We've stopped believing in truth and started knowing it was true?
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