I'm assuming at this point refusing will be a badge of honour but one which is terminal for federal funding, in this 4 year term if not longer. You would need very high confidence in your future career trajectory to do that.
We had a mini storm over government censorship of CSIRO science in Australia and it got pretty ugly, but this is much uglier.
If they do the same for NSF, earth sciences, DoE and AGW it's going to be pretty nasty.
I don't even have to agree with the science. This kind of mass bad-topic-ban is really unhelpful. I wonder if the editorial boards are also going to put up a fight? I can imagine some kind of "retracted because of Trump policy, not because the peer review process asked for it" markers.
Genetics, and Lysenkoism comes to mind. A stain on soviet science which echoed down the years.
If they do give in though, they might face consequences after Trump’s term. The Supreme Court should definitely chime in quickly here, although the court is stacked way too heavily with conservatives who open to Trump’s new interpretation of the constitution.
Holding back science publication for national security is pretty well understood. I'd be amazed if the funding T&C doesn't have weasel words back to the sixties about requiring permission from the feds to publish, even if it was implicitly assumed most of the time.
I think this move by the administration is a bad idea but it's not necessarily illegal. Which federal law or Constitution article do you think is being broken here?
You have a whole government getting dismantled, with purpose. I wouldn’t bet on Trump getting reelected or extending his term — but the bigger question is: what will be left at the end of it?
It’s not impossible the very idea of a “US presidency” radically changes by 2028.
USAID is basically shut down right now. It’s illegal, of course—it was created by an act of Congress and the money it gives out is typically in the form of contracts for specific projects, so everyone not getting paid has a contract dispute.
But it’ll take time for the administration to lose in court. In the meantime, the lack of cash flow is causing people to be laid off and then organizations will shutter. And that’s the goal, dismantling the capability.
We’ll know which way the wind is blowing by the midterms. If the plan is to never cede power again it will also have to be done by then. Trump is speed running the US to a recession which bodes well for 2026 assuming they happen.
They probably won't need the military: the police itself is already heavily militarized. But I have no illusion that Hegseth would even blink one eye before deploying soldiers domestically.
Right now I wouldn’t be certain there will be anything resembling midterms. Trump and his pals are speedrunning turning America into an Russia-style oligarchy. There will be of course be “elections”, that happen to always turn out exactly like the sitting power wants it to be.
I'm not saying they wouldn't like to try that, but I'm not sure exactly how that may happen.
Do you think flooding the zone with shit will work? If they actively rig the next elections do you think that any attempt to point that out will be met by "you were saying all the time that elections cannot be rigged"?
It seems society has been caught off guard by the transformation in the media landscape and the resulting fragmentation of attention.
If the POTUS were to determine the outcome of the midterm elections by decree, that act would be legal. The SCOTUS has already paved all the way to hell.
And who says they are willing to hold fair elections next time? They are not going to conceed power voluntarily, especially not now since they see what they can get away with and that means if you let them, they will "win", just like the decades of "wins" in other authoritarian states.
"a republic, if you can keep it" and obviously you can't.
I'm tired of people crying wolf, like they've done pretty much every day since 2016.
I'm not a fan of Trump, but his critics have pretty much squandered their credibility, and his political opponents have dumb strategies and even dumber priorities (if you can even take them at their word).
I believe Trump is a fascist who is extremely dangerous and everything he did so far ticks all the boxes. And by the way: In the wolf story you refer to the wolf was real. The real moral of that story is that the villagers should have trusted the boy (to prevent his death) and help him, as he in fact saw a wolf (who ate him in the end). The story says that the boy lied, but as he died that story would have been told be the villagers who let him die. The wolf was real (he ate the boy), the villagers made up a story after the fact of how the boy had it coming as a lier to justify their position.
It is a story about people who are more afraid of the scary story and the messenger who tells it, than of the actual danger itself. About people who despite warnings let the boy get eaten, because they checked the first two times and the evil wasn't directly evident to them.
In German we say about fascism: "Wehret den Anfängen" (defend against the beginnings). Once you are in a fascist society, once the wolf is eating you, it is to late. And the wolf is real.
Trumps opponents, collectively, have been crying wolf. They've been saying we're just around the corner from a a dictatorship for years, and Trump had a whole term and a dictatorship didn't happen.
And we're talking about some new-style political correctness here, but you're jumping to "we may never have elections ever again!1!!." If there's actual danger, people need to fucking stay focused and not get distracted and habitually overreact. Overreaction does two bad things: 1) it burns up your credibility, because it's a lie; and 2) when acted upon it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as it triggers reactions of its own.
> I believe Trump would have lost if this was a fair election.
Election denial? Not a good look.
> In the wolf story you refer to the wolf was real.
Only at the the end, not at the beginning. In the beginning, the boy was lying to get attention.
> The real moral of that story is that the villagers should have trusted the boy (to prevent his death) and help him, as he in fact saw a wolf (who ate him in the end).
No it isn't. The real moral is don't lie, otherwise people stop trusting you and bad things will happen. It's explicitly stated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf: "The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is, 'this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them'".
If you get something so basic as that wrong, it calls everything else you say into question.
> The story says that the boy lied, but as he died that story would have been told be the villagers who let him die. The wolf was real (he ate the boy), the villagers made up a story after the fact of how the boy had it coming as a lier to justify their position.
> It is a story about people who are more afraid of the scary story and the messenger who tells it, than of the actual danger itself. About people who despite warnings let the boy get eaten, because they checked the first two times and the evil wasn't directly evident to them.
> There was a boy tending the sheep who would continually go up to the embankment and shout, 'Help, there's a wolf!' The farmers would all come running only to find out that what the boy said was not true. Then one day there really was a wolf but when the boy shouted, they didn't believe him and no one came to his aid. The whole flock was eaten by the wolf. The story shows that this is how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them.
The boy lived; the farmers believed him, and were not afraid of the story so were fooled for a time; there was no coverup.
Oh sure, I'm not suggesting Trump has a fountain of youth in his bedroon. Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il also eventually died, ending their terms. At least in their case, or pre-democracy European countries, the power was very explicitly blood-bound. This had the advantage that if a few quickly died in succession you might just get a child on the throne who ends up being overthrowable.
Unfortunately, this problem has been solved by dictatorships where the power is tied to a party or small non-familial circle, such as China, potentially Russia (though we'd have to see how things end up would Putin disappear tomorrow, they may actually have reverted to familiar inheritance) and now, likely, the US. There, pesky biology forms no such risk.
The dynastic approach to power retention requires a coalition of ideologically unified extremists to keep it going. One key feature of the Trump coalition is that everyone hates each other. They all are cranks who want something unthinkably awful, but also don't care about what the other guy wants and hopes they don't get what they want[0]. There is no Trumpism to rally around, only a Trump.
[0] A microcosm of this is the Musk / Altman feud.
You’re a little early to come to this conclusion and dictators don’t require a political coalition, they just reward loyalty and eliminate opposition ruthlessly. You’re still playing a game Trump doesn’t want to play (democracy).
Hitler was also perceived as a worthless clown who could be easily manipulated by other interests when first elected. But he was cunning enough to eliminate all opposition and start a world war. Putin and Xi (who Trump admires and looks up to) are very similar.
Trump could easily start a dynastic takeover of the republican party, there is more than one Trump (Ivanka, Baron, etc). There are many reasons to be fearful at this juncture, especially if you live in the US.
I agree with all of it and think the likelihood of a dynastic takeover is over 50%.
But I don't think this is entirely accurate
> Hitler was also perceived as a worthless clown who could be easily manipulated by other interests when first elected. But he was cunning enough to eliminate all opposition and start a world war. Putin and Xi (who Trump admires and looks up to) are very similar.
Especially with Putin, as far as I can tell at no point was he considered a clown by anyone who mattered. He was definitely underestimated, but it's a marked difference with Trump (and Hitler).
Yes there are certainly differences and that description doesn’t fit him so well but he was certainly underestimated, in particular his vindictive ruthlessness (a trait he shares with trump).
That old piece of paper? Obviously that wasn’t really what they meant at the time, just like the 14th amendment doesn’t really grant birthright citizenship. Why, the whole thing is really just a set of guidelines that need to be interpreted by a council of clerics.
That's been the opinion of every intellectual giant who said that the republicans wouldn't steal the supreme court, that abortion wasn't on the table, that trump would never be elected, that he wasn't a threat (then he pulled a treason), that he would never be elected again.
Continue to pish posh while they continue dismantling the republic.
So your plan is to freak out every time some junior backbencher proposes something, like it actually means something? You'll be freaking out all the time, and what will it accomplish? You might as well put on a pink hat and run around Washington DC for a weekend.
And then, maybe when the idea actually gets pursued, it won't seem so controversial because all the energy was wasted before it was actually a thing.
> Continue to pish posh while they continue dismantling the republic.
If you don't want it dismantled, you can start by not getting distracted by dumb stuff and/or taking the bait. Then, the next step is to realize the politics of maximum opposition failed, and try something else.
Keep ignoring the world in front of your eyes.
Edit: Also if you think the "world of maximal opposition has failed" that's very amusing as the level of opposition was extremely low.
Get your pink hat on, it's time to waste your energy on the wrong things.
> Keep ignoring the world in front of your eyes. Edit: Also if you think the "world of maximal opposition has failed" that's very amusing as the level of opposition was extremely low.
Trump got elected, despite being portrayed constantly as both hopelessly incompetent, totally unacceptable politically, and as existential threat to democracy by his opponents and most of the media; being subject to multiple criminal investigations by them; having huge protests against him; and more than $1.4 billion spent on advertising against him. He was opposed to the legal maximum, and anything more would have gotten into armed militia territory.
Ugh, I knew I'd get 10 different replies all saying the same thing about how he's going to get around it. Yes, I know. My point was that making a comparison to Joe Biden as the parent did does not follow, since Biden was not term-limited.
We had a mini storm over government censorship of CSIRO science in Australia and it got pretty ugly, but this is much uglier.
If they do the same for NSF, earth sciences, DoE and AGW it's going to be pretty nasty.
I don't even have to agree with the science. This kind of mass bad-topic-ban is really unhelpful. I wonder if the editorial boards are also going to put up a fight? I can imagine some kind of "retracted because of Trump policy, not because the peer review process asked for it" markers.
Genetics, and Lysenkoism comes to mind. A stain on soviet science which echoed down the years.