Category Archives: The War on Smart

Scientific Refugees

The Sleep of Reason, The War on Smart

 

I recently posted about the cuts of the Trump administration to the National Institute of Heal (‘NIH’) and the National Science Foundation which it funds. In that  post I mentioned how bad this was for the health of the world.  Now I want to point out another uncomfortable result.

 

As a result of the cutbacks entire labs have already been shut down and many more are on the way. And with them goes all that incredible scientific research which will go unfunded. Many scientific grants have already been rescinded and many more will soon face the same fate. Scientists on the ground or in labs are already being shut down.

 

According to Dr. Leana Wen, some of them have been shut down for highly dubious grounds. For example, if their research contains Trump-despised keywords such as “gender” or “health equity” or “coronavirus” or “vaccines” or “HIV,” they were the first ones on the chopping block. At the same time billions in funds to American universities, once widely recognized as the best in the world have been frozen. Many universities have had to slim down their budgets. As a result, there are hiring freezes at these universities with funding to graduate students and post-doc that are also frozen. As Wen said,

 

“there are already really significant impacts on American scientists and also on young scientists, many of whom are now saying, well, they don’t know if they want to stay in the sciences because they don’t know if a future for them here.”

 

 

As a result, places like Europe, China, and even Canada are aggressively trying to recruit American scientists. Wen said,

 

“My own anecdotal evidence is that China has been laying out the red carpet for all the graduate students being kicked out of America…I think the brain drain is real.”

 

Imagine that. For decades the United States has poached scientists from around the world. Now they are being poached! It is clear that this will lead to the end of American supremacy in science.

 

As Dr. Wen said,

 

“The European Union is investing 600 million euros to recruit American scientists. The French parliament has a bill to establish a new category for scientific refugees from the US. And I just have to say, this is really unimaginable.

 

And those scientists will help countries like China to develop the best technology, including military technology. This could herald the end of American dominance.

 

Trump is Making America Stupid Again, and it could pay a hefty price for that.

 

In the world of dumb, Donald Trump is king!

 

America Can’t be Great if America is Stupid

Death of Truth, reason, The Sleep of Reason, The War on Smart

 

America has been the center of knowledge and thinking and frankly, brains, for a long time. What Americans have done is astonishing and ought to be celebrated.  But what it is now doing is cause for deep concern. America seems bent on destroying what it has built up and has no one to blame but itself.

 

Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times and a professor at an elite University, namely, Duke University. Now in some circles that is about equivalent to saying Bruni is a child molester. What could be worse?

 

That is how the Trumpsters feel about such a person. They don’t like smart. They prefer dumb. Bruni pointed out that,

 

“But Trump doesn’t seem to get that. Doesn’t want to get that. Gets only that the wonky and effete denizens of the world of ideas aren’t his people, aren’t guaranteed supporters, don’t lavishly praise him and sometimes dare to disparage him. They need their comeuppance, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else.”

 

 

Bruni justifiably criticizes Trump for that, but he seems to think this is all Trump’s fault. The sad fact is the happy Trumpsters by and large feel the same about such smarts as Trump does.

 

Bruni pointed out validly that for decades, at least 60 years if not more, America has been known around the world for the quality of its universities. They are not perfect, they at times slip into anti-semitism, though not as often or as consistently as Trump claims nor his supporters. American universities have been a driving force in the steep rise in quality of economic life during this time. And that has given The US an incredible global economic advantage over its rivals. As Bruni said,

 

“Among our most significant competitive advantages are our scientists, our laboratories, our system of higher education. They’re a kind of superpower, their output an engine of our wealth — of frontier-expanding technology, medical breakthroughs and production innovations that enrich companies as they improve lives.”

 

No one should try to claim that they can’t be improved, but frankly to defund our scientists and universities is about as stupid as defunding the police would be.

 

The most important thing is not to cherish ignorance. Both the left and the right can do better.

The only thing we have that resembles a super power is our smarts.

As Frank Bruni said: “America can’t be great if America is stupid.”

 

Improper Ideology and Treasuring Ignorance

Death of Truth, Social Justice, The War on Smart, Woke, Woke

 

Donald Trump is indeed a master turning accusations against his accusers.

 

One of the best recent examples of this technique, was when Trump issued an executive order called “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY.” Trump stated that “over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

 

As we all know this is precisely what Trump has done over and over again. As John Biewen said in his podcast, “Orwell could not have said it better himself. Because of course Trump is doing precisely what he accuses his opponents of doing: replacing facts with ideology.”

 

 

As a result of this order, the internationally respected Smithsonian Museum must in the future ensure that they do not employ “improper ideology.”   Any exhibits that “divide Americans based on race” by creating the wildly improbably claim that white Americans treated African-Americans shamefully would run afoul of this rule. This rule was particularly offended by a prior exhibit while Biden was in power called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” because it pointed out that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”

 

Such an exhibit, no matter how much history supports the conclusion cannot be true because American conservatives are uncomfortable at the thought that it might be true.

 

At the same time any suggestions that American men have used their power to dominate women is again out of bounds. American men would never do that. The museum should only celebrate the achievements of women.

 

As Orwell said, slavery is freedom. War is peace.

 

John Biewen said,

 

“The author of Trump’s executive order doesn’t explain what’s wrong with these historically and scientifically uncontroversial statements. The administration apparently assumes that everyone – in the intended audience, anyway, the MAGA base – will nod in agreement that this is typical woke nonsense.”

 

Trump and his cohorts were also saddened that in some places statues of Christopher Columbus on pedestals had been taken down. As Shannon Speed, a Chickasaw Nation member and director of UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center, explained to Public Radio, “the explorer’s legacy, besides “discovering” the “New World,” also includes “pillaging, raping and generally setting in motion a genocide of the people who were already here.” These really are not controversial statements at all, but Trump and his happy Trumpsters don’t like to be reminded of these uncomfortable facts.

 

 

As always, Trump made no attempt to disprove any claims by museums or scholars. He just says all the criticism is “nothing but woke.” As John Biewen said,

 

“Trump and his henchpersons want to return men like Columbus to their pedestals for obvious reasons. If they can re-establish Columbus as an untarnished hero – along with America’s slaveholding founders – maybe that will stop all this bothersome talk about injustices done to oppressed groups, both past and present, and discredit any efforts at redress and repair. Only a “Radical Left Lunatic” would want to dwell on the racist, sexist, homophobic or economic abuses carried out by historical figures – or by the current regime. Enough with all that.”

 

 

David Joy is a novelist who weighed in on this issue before the North Carolina commission investigating the issue as a result of a Confederate memorial. Joy is a descendant of enslavers and pointed out to the commission  that he had grown up with such memorials and how his people in the south  revered the slave state. These were his people. He had grown up with them and loved them. “And then,” he said, “I grew up. And I read books.” That’s it. He learned the truth and that was not quite as rosy as the previous generation had made it out to be. He did not let his discomfort over that truth impair him. As he said to the commission, “Yes, millions of Americans still treasure their ignorance and will do their best to defend it. But a whole lot of us feel differently.”

 

I hope he’s right.

 

Sacred Ignorance 

Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, The War on Smart

 

For a couple of years now I have listening to a series of podcasts from Scene on Radio out of Duke University. It is developed by John Biewen. I found them very interesting. One of my favorite podcast series

 

In 2025 that series included a fascinating episode  on Making Ignorance Sacred Again.  That title came from a piece written by James Baldwin, a fount of wisdom in my opinion, in 1959 when he wrote that stunning line: “Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred.” To me that summed up Donald Trump and his movement. That is what they want to do. They want to destroy truth, knowledge, and wisdom. They like dumb. They find dumb congenial. Or as Carl Sagan said, they celebrate ignorance.

 

This also calls to mind a statement by another brilliant writer, Milan Kundera, from his book, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where he said “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” .

 

If you want to be an autocrat you must control not only the future but the past. You have to wreck history. As John Biewen said,

 

“It seems if you’re trying for an autocratic takeover, you want to control just about everything. You want power over the administrative state and everyone in it, including agencies that are meant to be independent. You’ll try to neuter or commandeer the legislature, the courts, the big law firms. You’ll seek to control the news media and the universities. If you can, you’re going to take charge of the immigration system so you can decide who is a citizen, who stays in the country or gets whisked away to a foreign gulag, who is or isn’t a person deserving of human and legal rights. You’ll want possession of private information on everybody so you can use that data to attack your enemies.

You want all this power so you can shape the future, but you’ll also want to seize control of the past.”

 

Anyone who has ever watched or listened to Donald Trump knows that his go-to line of attack is to charge  any accuser with precisely the accusation against him.   The accusation of ‘Fake News’ was early brought against Trump and he took it up against his accusers and used it so thoroughly that people forgot where it came from. Currently he is doing the same thing on the infamous Epstein files which has been an epic conspiracy theory of the far right, including particularly, the Trumpsters, and now he repeatedly calls it the Democratic conspiracy or the Liberal conspiracy. Now  it is true that the Democrats have taken it up when they saw his own base finding disappointment in their leader, but it has been a right -wing conspiracy theory for much longer than that. Soon most people and all of his base will forget that the Democrats did not start this conspiracy. Trump is very effective at this technique.

 

Another good example was when Trump shortly after taking office issued an executive order advancing what he called “patriotic education.” That was followed by a second called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which sought to end instruction about transgender issues, White privilege, and unconscious bias. He did that because he hated talk about transgender issues and the like because they are, in his language, “woke.” If anyone cries out against injustice Trump is opposed, as can be seen by his innumerable executive  orders that try hard to stamp out all justice. Like a creature out of Orwell’s book 1984 war is peace and slavery is freedom. Orwell was the first, to my knowledge, to describe this phenomenon of attacking the attacker. But Trump has perfected it.

 

Ignorance can be funny. Or not.

The Sleep of Reason, The War on Smart, Trump

 

Recently, I learned that comedians are smart. At least they are smart enough to gather together a diverse collection of funny people. And when they smell ignorance, they smell funny. Recently this was proved by the actions of Donald Trump. Actually, this has happened many times, but it certainly happened when Donald Trump declared war on brains. One of those actions—there are actually many—was the dismissal of basically all of the Department of Education. After all who needs education. Trump’s sons didn’t need no education!

 

As Jimmy Kimmel said, “Trump famously said he loves the poorly educated, and now he will have so many more people to love.” Supposedly that is what it means to say ignorance is bliss.

 

Kimmel also said this: “Trump signed the order [gutting the Department of Education] during an event at the White House. They invited  like ‘Hey kids, who hates school?’  And they’re like ‘Well we all do!’  And they said, ‘Well, good news, it’s over.’

 

One more comment from Kimmel:  “The idea behind this is to let the states come up with their own educational standards. For instance, from here one, in order to receive a high school diploma in Florida, all you have to do is complete the maze on the back of the kids’ menu at Fuddruckers.”

 

Jimmy Fallon said this, “Today, President Trump signed an executive order to shut down the Department of Education. It’s a historic move that years from now kids will not read about in history books.”

 

Greg Gutfeld said, “President Trump signed an order today to dismantle the Department of Education. Yep. Soon employees will be reading their pink slips at a third-grade level.”

 

Yes, in the good ole USA, famous the world over for the strength of its universities is turning to dumb. Dumb on steroids.  And this is no accident. This is what Trump and the Trumpsters want—ignorance.  They want dumb! They want it. And they’ll get it. Kimmel was right when he called it “a confederacy of dunces.”

 

Why does Trump want dumb?  I think Hannah Arendt had the answer::

 

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

 

Trump, like most totalitarians likes dumb! Look at his cabinet of sycophants and this is abundantly clear.

 

 

Celebration of Ignorance 

Death of Truth, The War on Smart

 

Carl Sagan was smart. Very smart.

 

Carl Sagan Was born in Brooklyn New York in 1939 and died in 1996 in Seattle, on my birthday. Not that this date is relevant. He was an American scientist and astronomer who spent a lot of time thinking about science and explaining science to ordinary folks and simpletons, like me. He did not shy away from controversy.

 

He attended the University of Chicago where he earned  bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astronomy and astrophysics. He became a Professor at the University of California Berkely and later  Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

 

But he became for his work popularizing science and making it accessible to ordinary people. His most famous work was with his wife Ann Druyan, called Cosmos. I actually never saw the original series but saw the later update, also called Cosmos by Neil de Grasse Tyson, another famous scientist turned popularizer.  Both men tried hard to educate the public about science and the importance of science.

 

It used to be that the United States was respected around the world for the greatness of its great universities.  Sadly, in the last year that great reputation has started to decline largely because of the work of the current president of the United States and his gang of merry Trumpsters. That is a huge shame and the longer that degradation continues, the worse it will be for not just the United States but the world. Together they have led a concerted attack on smart.

 

Sagan knew the dangers of ignorance.  Most of us are not so clear on that. In the last few years, led by the right-wing in America, appreciation of knowledge has been seriously eroding. This is what he said:

 

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting — profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

 

 

Carl Sagan was so smart he thought this might happen. Most of us thought it was inconceivable. We were wrong. dead wrong.  This is what Sagan said,

 

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

That is the part that really concerns me.  Americans, led by their president have celebrating how ignorant they are. That is truly shocking. And disturbing. This could, as Sagan said, “blow up in our faces.”

 

Sagan called his book from which these quotes are taken, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  We have to remember exactly that. without science and knowledge we truly are in the dark. That is nothing to celebrate.