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The New Dark Age

Red

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“Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.”

For the most part, authoritarians don’t like the intellectuals of their societies. And often go after them early in their consolidation of power. We can certainly see this happening in Trump’s attacks on Harvard University. And he did say he “loves the uneducated”. Well, duh, of course!

But, as this piece in today’s The Atlantic points out, this is not just an attack on higher education in the United States. Trump is involved in a broad based effort to destroy human knowledge. Sound extreme? Sure does not seem so to me, IMHO. The Big Lie is a deliberate distortion of History. But science and medical science have also not been spared this rather insane effort on Trump’s part. It’s been very transparent, and very easy to see. Heck, the guy who wrote “The Art of the Deal” for Trump was of the conviction that Trump hadn’t read a book in years.

Anyway, I think this piece is spot on. And, while there are a fair number of Trump threads, this attack on human knowledge itself is ridiculous, and highly destructive. So I may use this thread for Trump’s attacks on human knowledge itself, a destruction somewhat lost in all the political trauma many of us experience in dealing with fascism arriving in the Oval Office

Making America Dumb Again? Why?! A good percentage, no idea the exact number, are apparently willing to embrace stupidity, and support Trump’s effort to destroy human knowledge itself….I’d liked to hear how Trump apologists/MAGA justify something so WRONG? But they can’t, nobody can.


The warlords who sacked rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.

Perhaps the most prominent targets of the attack on knowledge have been America’s institutions of higher education. Elite colleges and universities have lost billions of dollars in federal funding. Cornell has had more than $1 billion frozen, Princeton had $210 million suspended, and Northwestern lost access to nearly $800 million. In some cases, the freezes weren’t connected to specific demands; the funding was simply revoked outright. Johns Hopkins University is reeling from losing $800 million in grants, which will force the top recipient of federal research dollars to “plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique,” The Wall Street Journalreported.

In some cases, the administration has made specific demands that institutionsadhere to Trumpist ideology in what they teach and whom they hire, or face a loss of funding. Some schools are fighting back—Harvard, for example, is suing to retain its independence. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president said in a statement.…..

……The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is not limited to academia, however. Across the government, workers whose job is to research, investigate, or analyze have lost funding or been fired.

These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts”to the Department of Education’s research division.

The most devastating cuts may be those to the government’s scientific-research agencies, such as the NIH and NSF. According to CBS News, since January, more than $2 billion has been cut from NIH and 1,300 employees have been fired. One former NIH employee told CBS that “work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.” The administration is also trying to halt financial support for projects that commit wrongthink, and has already drastically reduced the number of NSF grants.
 
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Harvard researchers devastated as Trump cuts nearly 1000 grants.


As the US government slashes Harvard University’s funding, the damage to research at the school is becoming clearer. Nature has learnt that researchers at the university have lost nearly 1,000 grants worth more than US$2.4 billion.

Last week, the administration of US President Donald Trump announced the terminations in a press release, but did not specify how many would be targeted or list individual grants. Nature obtained the figures from a variety of sources, including US funding agency employees and an online volunteer tracking effort at grant-watch.us.

An e-mail to Harvard from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) lists 193 grants worth nearly $150 million as being terminated, and one from the US Department of Defense (DoD) logs 56 grants worth $105 million. Other cuts are smaller: for instance, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Housing and Urban Development each terminated three grants. But by far, the largest tranche comes from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical science: it is cutting more than 600 grants worth about $2.2 billion over multiple years. The cuts do not include Harvard-affiliated hospitals.

Through research grants, the US government funds about 11% of Harvard’s annual $6.4 billion budget, and these cancellations will be devastating, researchers say. “Harvard cannot, even with its vast resources, just make up for this loss of federal funding,” says Joseph Loparo, a biological chemist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who lost two NIH grants for studying repair processes in DNA totalling $4.3 million.
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Will US science survive Trump 2.0?


In just the first three months of his second term, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science. His administration has fired thousands of government scientists, bringing large swathes of the country’s research to a standstill and halting many clinical trials. It has threatened to slash billions in funding from US research universities and has terminated more than 1,000 grants in areas such as climate change, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and HIV prevention.

This looks likely to be just the beginning. Congress approved a budget bill on 10 April that could lay the groundwork for massive spending cuts over the coming decade. The White House is expected to propose a budget for 2026 that would slash investments in science across the federal government; for example, the Trump administration is considering cutting the science budget for NASA nearly in half and spending at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 40%.

The administration has also begun implementing strict immigration measures that have left some students and researchers in detention centres, and many academics fear that these and future measures could spur researchers to look for opportunities outside the United States.

The dismantling of scientific institutions and of much of the research ecosystem has led increasing numbers of people inside and outside research to wonder how science will survive Trump. In March, some 1,900 members of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which represent the country’s leading scientists, published an open letter, declaring: “We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”

In a survey of Nature readers in April, 94% of nearly 1,600 respondents said they are worried about the future of science in the country. And the same proportion said the Trump administration’s science policies will have negative effects on the world. Although the poll did not include a statistically representative sample, it presents a window onto the concerns of a broad array of researchers (see ‘Trump effects’).

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Nothing remarkable here has been happening for years. Wait until he starts burning books.
I can appreciate that sentiment, to a degree. Conservatives think our universities are Woke propoganda factories, etc. But I don’t believe we should settle for that attitude completely, because it will gloss over just how serious the brain drain is. Right now. The attacks on knowledge itself, attacks wrapped up in conspiracism and other irrational beliefs, attacks derived from political animosity, the real RFK Jr., falling back, as expected, into his vaccine hysteria. Simply naming RFK Jr. to his position was a blaring declaration: Donald Trump does not respect medical science. The incredible research cuts. The Big Lie. An entire alternate American history created to justify a lie, and help create the belief that Democrats represent “the enemy within”. Creating an environment where more than half the population is regarded as “the enemy within”, and science and medical science are lying. This is a tad extreme, even for the paranoia we’ve come to expect from people fearful of the future.

I don’t know if we’ll have Fahrenheit 451 book burnings on the streets of America. Clearly, there would be gleeful and ignorant crowds. But I believe this moment is different. It’s not the same ole culture war of Woke professors poisoning the minds of America’s youth, as seen from one side, although that belief in “Woke” poisoning minds still holds firm.

We have certainly had anti-science moments. The Scopes monkey trial of 1925 comes to mind(From Wiki: “The trial publicized the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which set modernists, who believed evolution could be consistent with religion, against fundamentalists, who believed the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools. The trial became a symbol of the larger social anxieties associated with the cultural changes and modernization that characterized the decade of the 1920s in the United States”.). Serious ant-science feelings are not new in the United States.

Now, we’re creating a brain drain…


View: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/56UKr6W9YQY
 
I can appreciate that sentiment, to a degree. Conservatives think our universities are Woke propoganda factories, etc. But I don’t believe we should settle for that attitude completely, because it will gloss over just how serious the brain drain is. Right now. The attacks on knowledge itself, attacks wrapped up in conspiracism and other irrational beliefs, attacks derived from political animosity, the real RFK Jr., falling back, as expected, into his vaccine hysteria. Simply naming RFK Jr. to his position was a blaring declaration: Donald Trump does not respect medical science. The incredible research cuts. The Big Lie. An entire alternate American history created to justify a lie, and help create the belief that Democrats represent “the enemy within”. Creating an environment where more than half the population is regarded as “the enemy within”, and science and medical science are lying. This is a tad extreme, even for the paranoia we’ve come to expect from people fearful of the future.

I don’t know if we’ll have Fahrenheit 451 book burnings on the streets of America. Clearly, there would be gleeful and ignorant crowds. But I believe this moment is different. It’s not the same ole culture war of Woke professors poisoning the minds of America’s youth, as seen from one side, although that belief in “Woke” poisoning minds still holds firm.

We have certainly had anti-science moments. The Scopes monkey trial of 1925 comes to mind(From Wiki: “The trial publicized the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which set modernists, who believed evolution could be consistent with religion, against fundamentalists, who believed the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools. The trial became a symbol of the larger social anxieties associated with the cultural changes and modernization that characterized the decade of the 1920s in the United States”.). Serious ant-science feelings are not new in the United States.

Now, we’re creating a brain drain…


View: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/56UKr6W9YQY



We had the same issue here under the former Howard government and their culture wars. Years of wars on Universities and in particulars humanities faculties, systemic understaffing of departments and annual funding cutbacks gutted available subjects and inflated tutorial sizes to 30+. All very deliberate, funnily enough the only university that was mainly exempt was the ANU, where a heap of defence and intelligence staff study.

In addition to this, in the primary and secondary sector education funding was transferred from public to private schools with the deliberate goal of creating a two tiered system. Obviously with outcomes for students in the private being significantly better than outcomes and opportunities for public students.

All in all the impact of it long term has been marginal, the drop out rate amongst the private school educated in Uni is significantly higher than those from the public schools, however, i would say overall private students have and make better networking connections that allow them to succeed even if they fail in the classroom.
 
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The attack on human knowledge and medical science, specifically, is glaringly present in the person of RFK Jr. And his directives are alarming medical researchers and scientists.




MAHA? The man himself said nobody should be taking medical advice from him. Yet, he’s perfectly OK with dispensing it. RFK Jr. is an integral part of the attack on knowledge in the United States. And we’re still in the opening stages of Trump 2.0!


Advocates for pregnant people said they are alarmed by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s unprecedented and unilateral decision to remove Covid-19 booster shotsfrom the recommended immunization schedule.

A vaccine’s inclusion on the schedule is important for patient access, because many private health insurance plans determine which vaccines to cover based on the schedule.


“Covid-19’s impact on pregnancy is deeply personal to me,” said Dr Amanda Williams, interim chief medical officer at March of Dimes, a non-profit focused on the health of mothers and babies, in a statement.

“During the height of the pandemic, I cared for a healthy patient who was 32 weeks pregnant and tragically died from Covid-19 despite state-of-the-art medical care. One of her last words was that she wished she had taken the vaccine.”

The Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine (SMFM), experts on high-risk pregnancy, said in a statement that it “strongly reaffirms its recommendation that pregnant patients receive the Covid-19 vaccine”, and that the vaccine is safe to receive at any time during pregnancy.

In a statement, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) said it was “concerned about and extremely disappointed”.

“We also understand that despite the change in recommendations from [health and human services], the science has not changed,” said Dr Steven J Fleischman, ACOG president. “It is very clear that Covid-19 infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic and lead to major disability, and it can cause devastating consequences for families,” said Fleischman.

Kennedy made the announcement on Tuesday on social media, flanked by Trump administration appointees to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – neither of whom are typically involved in such decisions.

Typically, changes to the recommended vaccine schedule are based on open public debate and the recommendation of an independent panel of experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory committee on immunization practices.

Kennedy’s announcement circumvented both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its advisory panel, and neither body was advised of the forthcoming decision, sources told STAT. The CDC is currently without a leader.

A directive making the change official, also reported by STAT, suggested that Kennedy reviewed the evidence with the FDA. That agency’s advisory committee, which is structured similarly to the CDC’s, was also bypassed.

Just a week earlier, the FDA’s head, Dr Marty Makary, published a similarly unprecedented article in the New England Journal of Medicine that described pregnancy and recent pregnancy as on a list of “underlying medical conditions that can increase a person’s risk of severe Covid-19”.
 
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“Gold Standard science”? Achieved by placing political appointees in charge of what science is published and promoted, and what science is attacked, because it’s not politically correct.

Is that an effective way to advance human knowledge? And if science is not self correcting, it’s not actually science. Using political calculations to decide what science is acceptable is also not science. And this new EO is ridiculous. The “Gold Standard Science” EO represents an attack on human knowledge. It is an attack on independent science. It is an anti-science executive order. Again, whatever else Trump represents, he represents an effort to control and direct efforts to place science itself under political control….


A new term keeps popping up in messages from Trump administration scientific agencies — a pledge to restore “gold-standard science.”
Many scientists say the opposite is happening.

The administration’s “MAHA Report,” intended to diagnose the root cause of poor health in American children, was written by Cabinet officials and political appointees, most of whom lack scientific and medical expertise. It included numerous errors, such as garbled references and invented studies. Thousands of grants that went through expert peer review have been terminatedbecause they conflict with political priorities. The administration is proposing to reclassify government officials involved in grantmaking to “increase career employee accountability,” which critics see as a way to inject politics into science.


And in a “Gold Standard Science” executive order last week, President Donald Trump outlined a new level of oversight over what counts as quality evidence and what does not, putting “a senior appointee designated by the agency head” in charge of overseeing “alleged violations.” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a briefing that the goal of the executive order is to “rebuild the American people’s confidence in the national science enterprise … the status quo of our research enterprise has brought diminishing returns, wasted resources and public distrust.”

Hundreds of scientists are now pushing back, saying that the administration could damage science even as it co-opts the language of a movement aimed at improving it. During the last Trump administration, there were efforts to limit the kind of evidence that could be used to inform environmental policy, and these researchers fear that “gold-standard science” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Berna Devezer, a professor of marketing at the University of Idaho who studies “metascience” — research into the scientific process itself — said the enhanced role of political appointees raises serious questions.

“One aspect of the [executive order] that seems clearly alarming from a scientific point of view is the centralization and consolidation of political control over the scientific infrastructure and practice — in other words, regulatory capture of science,” she wrote in an email. “Science is essentially effective to the extent that it can remain independent, decentralized, and democratic.”

A petition led by the advocacy group Stand Up for Science with more than 5,000 signatories says the executive order has “hijacked” scientific language to do the opposite of what it claims. The order, the petition argues, will “undermine scientific rigor and the transparent progress of science.”
Separately, a group of prominent scientists wrote in the Guardianon Thursday, “Hidden beneath the scientific rhetoric is a plan that would destroy scientific independence in the US by giving political appointees the latitude to dismiss entire bodies of research and punish researchers who fail to fall in line with the current administration’s objectives.”

A White House spokesman and Health and Human Services spokesman did not respond to questions about critiques of the executive order.
 
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I thought of posting this in the climate change thread, since a conspiracist suggested chemtrails were “a thing” in that thread. They are not, but conspiracy mongers afraid of, or perhaps politically motivated to promote the belief, have made it one of the more unusual conspiracy theories to emerge in the United States over the past 20+ years. I remember people talking about chemtrails in the 1990’s.

Decided to include the info here, because it is an attack on rational thought, and a good example of preferring false information over accurate understanding. This is dumbing down, something MAGA excels at.


A conspiracy theory that airplanes are leaving nefarious “chemtrails” in their wake due to a sinister government plot has been given fresh impetus in the US amid a swirl of concerns and confusion about proposals to geoengineer a response to the climate crisis.

State legislation to ban what some lawmakers call chemtrails has been pushed forward in Tennessee and, most recently, Florida. Meanwhile, Robert F Kennedy, who has expressed interest in the conspiracy theory on social media and his podcast, is set to be at the heart of Donald Trump’s new administration following his nomination as health secretary.

“We are going to stop this crime,” Kennedy, who is known for his contrarian stances on vaccines and offshore wind farms, wrote about chemtrails on X in August. The former Democrat turned Trump ally said on his podcast last year that it was “kind of frightening to think that somebody may be putting large amounts of bioavailable aluminum into the environment, spraying it in microscopic particulates from airplanes”.

Robert F Kennedy Jr: ‘We are going to stop this crime.’

Believers of the chemtrails conspiracy theory contend that the white lines traced in the sky behind aircraft contain toxic chemicals that are released to achieve a devious end, such as mass sterilization or mind control.

This theory, which has no evidence to support it, has been put forward at various times since the 1990s despite being repeatedly debunked. Now, scientists are faced with a resurgent focus on chemtrails amid a related, more substantive, debate over whether actual modifications to the Earth’s atmosphere should be made in a desperate attempt to slow global heating.

Interest in chemtrails “bubbles up every once in a while and the hurricanes and weather modification kind of brings it up to the floor again”, said David Fahey, director of the chemical sciences laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), in reference to two recent major hurricanes – Helene and Milton – that some figures, including Republicans, claimed were somehow steered by the federal government’s meddling with the weather.

“The misinformation is abundant,” said Fahey, who has spent several decades, on and off, fielding questions about chemtrails. There was no orchestrated weather modification conducted by Noaa, Fahey said, and even experimenting with such a thing would be a “big step for our agency and one that we are not quite prepared to do at the moment, and maybe our agency shouldn’t do it”.
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Just another reason to consider RFK Jr. one of the stupidest members of the most ignorant cabinet in our history.

Sad, very sad. But not a surprise that MAGA believes in chemtrails. More info in the climate thread….


View: https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1828160428154966286
 
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