“The New Know Nothings’ wrecking ball”
– by Merrill Goozner
Photos from this weekend’s Arise for Science on the Lincoln Memorial despatched me scrambling for the historical past books. Hundreds turned out to protest the cuts in science funding ordered by the New Know Nothings:
A president who declares international warming a hoax; a secretary of well being who sees extra hurt than good in vaccines; and an unelected billionaire who makes use of a meat axe to pare international well being packages.
The unique Know Nothings sought electoral energy within the late 1840s and early 1850s on an anti-Catholic platform aimed toward demonizing and deporting tens of millions of Irish and German immigrants. The Know Nothing identify got here from directions that members say “I know nothing” if requested concerning the get together’s secret rituals and violent assaults on immigrants. The get together’s place in historical past gave the identify a really totally different which means.
The Lincoln Memorial was an applicable place for the scientists’ protest towards the brand new know-nothingism. The rise of the Know Nothings divided and ultimately destroyed the Whig Social gathering — then the opposition to the pro-slavery Democratic Social gathering. It led abolitionists and free soilers like Illinois’ Abraham Lincoln to kind the Republican Social gathering to oppose slavery’s enlargement. The ensuing get together realignment led to the Civil Struggle.
“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?” Lincoln wrote to Joshua Velocity in 1855. “How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?”
Huge VHA cuts coming
Degrading white (and black and brown) veterans is definitely on the New Know Nothings’ agenda. Authorities Govt journal reported final week that Veterans Administration Secretary Doug Collins plans to eradicate 83,000 jobs or almost 20% of the workforce at an company that gives well being care at for greater than 9 million veterans at 1,380 well being care amenities throughout the nation. One-third of VA employees are veterans; two-thirds of these enrolled and handled by the VA are white.
The VA additionally gives websites for quite a few medical research, usually in collaboration with educational medical facilities, that search to enhance veterans’ and the final inhabitants’s well being. The VA, like different analysis websites, will bear the brunt of a choice made final week by the brand new management on the Nationwide Institutes of Well being to terminate tens of millions of {dollars} in analysis grants. The order was finishing up Trump’s government order defunding something associated to range, fairness, and inclusion.
The implementation of that order is another affirmation that we at the moment are dwelling in a rustic beneath diktat rule. The contract cancellations ignored a Maryland federal choose’s injunction blocking strikes towards DEI packages as violations of freedom of speech.
‘We don’t want no stinkin’ 1st modification’
The most recent transfer towards educational speech came visiting the weekend with the administration’s cancellation of about $400 million in grants to Columbia College. The explanation: its alleged failure to silence antisemitic speech on campus. Whereas the transfer didn’t have an effect on grants from NIH, in accordance to the Wall Avenue Journal, it definitely violated the primary modification and any semblance of due course of.
I’m simply one in every of hundreds of Columbia graduates (Journalism College, 1982) who acquired a really disappointing electronic mail letter from interim president Katrina Armstrong on Friday evening. She wrote . . .
“We are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns. To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism. This is our number one priority.”
Slaughter of the Innocents
For the reason that Hamas slaughter of greater than 1,200 harmless Israelis? Greater than 40,000 harmless Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The results of which have been parking protests around the globe towards Israel’s techniques. Antisemitism is an actual drawback in our society. However anti-Zionist and even anti-Jewish speech shouldn’t be a criminal offense, not more than racist or anti-immigrant speech is a criminal offense.
But Columbia threw the coed chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace and College students for Justice in Palestine off campus for “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The New York Civil Liberties Union filed go well with towards Columbia for bypassing regular disciplinary channels and violating civil legal guidelines prohibiting disproportionate sanctions.
“This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent,” mentioned Reinhold Martin, a Columbia historian of structure and president of the college’s American Affiliation of College Professors, or AAUP, chapter.
“And for those who take the Trump administration’s actions at face value, remember Charlottesville.” (Nazis: “The Jews will not replace us.” Trump: “You had some very fine people on both sides.”)
I’ll resume my small contributions to the J-school when a Columbia president makes defending freedom of speech as a lot a precedence as defending the sensitivities of scholars offended by opposing views.
The home fallout from assaults on international well being
In the meantime, the dire results of the Trump administration’s warfare on international help and international well being are being felt. Scripting this morning in The Atlantic, Craig Spencer, a public well being professor at Brown College and Ebola survivor from his time treating the illness outbreak in Africa, warns how that is undermining America’s outbreak preparedness. “We are sure to regret it,” he wrote.
Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the World Well being Group. Elon Musk’s division of presidency effectivity has all however destroyed the Company for Worldwide Growth, which along with combating illnesses around the globe feeds data on infectious illness outbreaks to the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention. Musk gleefully declares on his X platform (whose CDC account has been cancelled), the USAID has been “thrown it in the wood chipper.”
USAID’s Finances
“Much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores.” He wrote. “Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.”
With monkey pox, Ebola and Marburg outbreaks ongoing in Africa, Trump/Musk’s mass firings on the company eradicated all however six of the 50 positions monitoring infectious illness outbreaks around the globe. “I have no idea how six people are going to run four outbreak responses,” one nonetheless employed official advised the New York Occasions. He, like almost each one in every of 30 former and present authorities officers interviewed in a entrance web page story, selected to stay nameless out of worry of retribution.
Spencer additionally reviews that regardless of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s promise that waivers would permit lifesaving work in Africa and different elements of the creating world to proceed, “few have materialized.” The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Reduction, established beneath George W. Bush and largely funded by USAID, is on pause. Since its founding in 2003, PEPFAR has saved greater than 25 million lives. “More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program,” Spencer wrote.
For a full catalog of the devastating penalties from cuts in international well being help? Learn this memo, written by Nicholas Enrich. Nichoas is the performing administrator for international well being at USAID. He was instantly positioned on administrative go away after its launch.
Pandemic unpreparedness
Lastly, the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico continues to unfold. Greater than 200 folks have been contaminated, principally youngsters, and not less than two folks have died.
Texas well being officers reported almost the entire contaminated have been both unvaccinated or had “unknown” vaccination standing. Whereas the CDC web site (final checked March 10, 2025) continues to advertise vaccination as one of the simplest ways to forestall measles, the company introduced this weekend it could examine the hyperlink between vaccines and autism, a precedence for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What would Ben Franklin say about present analysis insurance policies?
A minimum of seven states run by the GOP are contemplating laws aimed toward banning or limiting use of mRNA vaccines, which was the know-how used to quickly develop the COVID photographs. Some in Congress are pushing an identical invoice. Kaiser Well being Information reviews a number of the state measures would superb and presumably revoke the licenses of docs who administer mRNA vaccines.
To sum up in the present day’s information: The administration ended help for abroad well being organizations offering early earnings about infectious illness outbreaks. All of it however eradicated workers that screens new threats. Analysis into promising applied sciences has ended whereas assist for brand spanking new analysis into completely debunked theories is increasing. A measles outbreak is quickly spreading.
As I wrote a month in the past concerning the recessionary affect of Medicaid and Reasonably priced Care Act subsidies (main media retailers have picked up on that theme; shopper confidence is collapsing; and as I write at mid-day in the present day, the S&P 500 is down 2.3%), what might presumably go incorrect?
