Trump's Attack on Science is an Attack on Truth
Per 'Le Monde': "Donald Trump and Elon Musk are plunging American science into an indescribable chaos."
Reading the foreign press can provide illuminating perspectives on what is happening in the United States.
In a recent opinion piece in France’s Le Monde, science journalist Stéphane Foucart makes clear that in cutting the budgets of agencies like the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, and others, Trump and Musk are doing nothing less than mounting an unprecedented attack on the production of knowledge itself. It’s a sobering realization.
As has been widely reported, with tens of thousands of jobs being eliminated across the federal government, we are losing experts in climate change, pandemics, wildfire management, neuroscience, cancer research … even people in charge of managing the country’s nuclear arsenal have been fired (though some of the latter had their jobs quickly reinstated).
This is all in the service of cutting what Sen. Ted Cruz has termed “woke DEI grants” to projects embodying “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” to agencies such as the National Science Foundation. The full database of NSF grants that have been frozen include research into gene expression in fruit flies, and a study of the economic impact of natural disasters. I’d be interested to know what is neo-Marxist or “woke” about such research.
It’s not that the American press is not reporting on such cuts. For example, NBC News has reported that the layoffs, funding freezes and executive orders targeting the sciences threaten to undermine decades of scientific research. Similar efforts were made by the first Trump administration.
But Foucart’s analysis goes deeper. He writes:
“Trump I attacked the inconvenient results of certain disciplines; Trump II declares an all-out war on science as a method of describing and objectifying reality. The current administration is now implementing a policy that aims to destroy the tools that make it possible to produce objective statements. Making reality disappear so that facts no longer harm the will of the leader: this is exactly what we expect from a fascist politics.” [Emphasis added.]
The boldface conclusion is the real point. Defunding research is a way not only of thwarting policies that could interfere with profits, but of manipulating our perceived reality by suppressing what Al Gore presciently called “inconvenient truths.”
Those of us who live in what a member of the George W. Bush administration famously dubbed the “reality-based community” need to continue to resist Orwellian attempts to undermine truth.