Dark Matter is a nefarious liberal plot?

In cosmology, Dark Matter is an exotic substance theorized to account for the behavior of large scale structures like galaxies and galactic structures. There are a number of possibilities, but over the last few years a consensus has begun to emerge among astrophysicists that it's made of non baryonic particles. That would be particles which are not made up of the quarks and gluons that make up protons and neutrons along with the electrons which orbit around them to form atoms. Atoms and photons are what make up the part of the universe we're most familiar with like stars, planets, and people. The present composition of the universe is thought to be represented in the pie chart below courtesy of the Wiki. That little orange and white sliver is the baryonic component. More on Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and Baryonic Matter at the respective links.

 The thing that makes non-baryonic particulate Dark Matter dark is that it doesn't interact with normal matter except through gravity. It's not affected by magnetic fields, it slides right through normal matter like a ghost through a wall, it doesn't shine like stars, or reflect light like planets, comets, or dust. One possible consequence is that Dark Matter can't cool by radiating light or by fusing nuclei in a star, so it can't glob up. Instead it would  form giant, diffuse clouds rather than small compact stars and planets. It's really, really, weird stuff.

Dark Matter was originally proposed to help explain why spiral galaxies rotate the way they do. They turn more like a single disk instead of swirling faster near the center and slower farther away from it. If stars in a spiral galaxy are embedded in an almost invisible diffuse cloud, the idea is the whole thing would turn like a pancake thus explaining the observed rotation. More recently, the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments have been used to produce computer reconstructions of the probable distributiuon of Dark Matter in the universe using clever, indirect technigues like gravitional lensing. The image right shows one such HST assisted reconstruction. On the scale shown a galaxy made up of billions and billions of stars would be a point of light about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

But via Ink Lake, the Conservapedia (A supposed conservative answer to the purportedly liberal Wikipedia) had a nifty little blurb -- now missing but already cached here with screen shot-- implying that, in addition to all that legitimate scientific mystery, there may be some kind of liberal-conservative split on ... Dark Matter?

A slight modification to Isaac Newton's theory for very low gravity and a new experiment may disprove liberal claims that "dark matter" comprises 25% of the universe ...

They're probably referring to the MOND (MOdified Newtownian Dynamics). It was also introduced to explain galactic rotation. MOND is an interesting hypothesis that speculates on large scales, gravity affects objects in orbit differently than it does on smaller scales. Thing is, I'm aware of no split in the cosmology community on Dark Matter vs. MOND that falls neatly across a progressive-conservative axis (Probably because there isn't one). But apparently the Conservapedia has staked out a claim on MOND and assigned Dark Matter to progressives for reason that defy explanation. Which, incidentally, is not a very safe bet the way things stand in the field of cosmology right now:  I'll give five to one odds on DM over MOND.

More importantly ... I know there are intelligent conservatives, lots of em. I spend a lot of time in Texas, grew up there, many of my friends are examples of educated, smart, informed right leaning voters. But I have to say, stuff like this paints them all, fairly or not, as total ignoramuses. This is why conservatives lack credibility on science and it's just one small example. That Conservapedia page is chock full of other howlers, like NASA is stupid because GISS climate researchers have taken the earth's temperature and found it's warming, or geologists are crazy or deluded when they say the planet is ancient, and of course Conservapedia argues that Young Earth Creationism is a valid scientific viewpoint supported by empirical evidence. We see these same ill-conceived stabs at science splattered all over the conservative blogosphere, in comments here and elsewhere, and routinely featured in mainstream conservative media.

These are all ideas that are somewhere between funny and sad, have been savagely debunked time and time again, and in the spirit of willful ignorance I'd add they're so old and tired that the last time I heard them I laughed so hard I fell right off my dinosaur in the Garden of Eden.