While Donald Trump mouthed populist, blue-collar bombast on the campaign trail, once sworn into office, he immediately put old-school commerce chiefs in position to run his empire. For the last two years, these corporate warriors have been chiseling through the barricade of laws, safety rules, and common-sense agreements that protect us from marauding commercial interests.

Reader, beware. Barbarians have entered the city. Washington has been sacked!

Journalists have rarely captured the perversity of Trumps willing soldiers. In February, the Los Angeles Times offered a glimpse as it spotlighted Ed Calabrese, a professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work tobacco and other poison-producers have long touted.

Calabrese is now helping Trump appointees rewrite public policy to claim that pollution is good for us. Stop and ponder that for a moment: Pollution is good for us.

But few Americans noticed the LA Times piece, which was based on hundreds of emails that the University of Massachusetts released showing Fox News commentator Steven J. Milloy, long a fixture of Washington intrigue, rallying Calabrese and other industry mercenaries and guiding them through D.C.s dark alleys of influence. The emails find them complaining at times that even Trumps business-friendly, anti-science policies dont go far enough.

This is an amazing assortment of emails as well as individuals, Lynn Goldman, the dean of The George Washington Universitys school of public health and a former deputy secretary at the Environmental Protection Agency, said via email. It does not surprise me to find that this Administration might be taking science advice at EPA from people like Milloy and Calabrese.

Milloy And Calabrese March On Washington

With his university credentials, Calabrese provides a patina of scientific respectability to Milloy, a lawyer, sometimes lobbyist and tireless soldier for companies needing to distract the public while they sell harmful or dangerous merchandise.

Milloy runs JunkScience.com and once wrote a science column for Fox News where he beat up on academics and public health advocates who were warning about secondhand smoke, toxic chemicals and pharmaceuticals suspected to cause heart attacks.

Back in 2006, I discovered that Mr. Junkscience received a sizable salary from a tobacco company, which I wrote about for The New Republic . Milloys column at Fox later disappeared even Fox News must feel shame when one of its writers is caught with a hand in the tobacco industrys cookie jar. (Milloy did not respond to multiple requests for comment about this story.)

Milloy soldiered on, popping up in a Vanity Fair cover story that documented Monsantos harassment of small farmers who opposed the companys move to monopolize agriculture. If you need more highlights of his mercenary career, Google Milloys crusade benefiting Exxon to deny climate change or his campaign to support the food industrys view that soda and junk food dont make our children obese.

I first noticed Calabrese while burrowing through tobacco documents to better understand Milloy. Tobacco companies apparently took an interest in Calabrese because he promotes a concept called hormesis, which argues that tiny amounts of toxic chemicals or radiation might be good for us. Regulatory agencies around the world reject hormesis, and scientists have dismissed it as religion , but the concept excites corporations because it justifies exposing all of us to radiation and toxic chemicals.

Tom Zoeller, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts, has followed Calabreses work for decades, growing more and more alarmed as his papers kept getting crazier and crazier. Eventually, he and his colleagues stopped protesting Calabreses writings. We would have to make a career out of responding to dumb statements, Zoeller said.