- RFK “retires” his vaccine advisory committee (because he knows better);
- Robert Reich on how the MAGA Inquisition will destroy American science, and Reich tries to understand why;
- Robert Reich on Trump’s war against California, and the central struggle of civilization;
- And some movie score music by Carter Burwell.
“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.” – Friedrich Nietzsche.
CNN, 9 Jun 2025: RFK Jr. removes all current members of CDC vaccine advisory committee
And
CNBC, 9 Jun 2025: RFK Jr. removes all members of CDC panel advising U.S. on vaccines
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Robert Reich, 9 Jun 2025: Nobody Expected the MAGA Inquisition, subtitled “But it’s here, and will destroy American science”
It was obvious, if you thought about it, that the second Trump administration would be hostile to science and intellectual endeavor in general.
After all, look at some key elements of the MAGA coalition. Fossil fuel interests don’t want anyone studying climate change. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones make much of their money selling quack medical remedies, which makes them hostile to conventional medicine. (And partisan orientation became a key factor determining whether people were willing to be vaccinated against Covid.) Practitioners of voodoo economics don’t want anyone looking into the actual results of cutting taxes on the rich. Nativists proclaiming an immigrant crime wave don’t want anyone examining who commits violent crimes. And so on.
Even so, the extreme nature of the assault has caught almost everyone by surprise. American scientific leadership and the prestige of our research universities are key pillars of U.S. power and prosperity. Corporate America certainly understands that our scientific and educational institutions contribute to its bottom line. So you might have expected even MAGA enthusiasts to be a bit cautious about killing this particular golden-egg-laying goose.
You would have been wrong. Everything points to an effort to effectively destroy U.S. science — not gradually as part of a long-term plan, but over the next year or two.
Why??
One answer is that key MAGA figures really don’t believe that we need foreigners. Steve Bannon has suggested that Asian immigrants working in Silicon Valley constitute “unfair competition,” that they’re taking the “high-valuated tech jobs” that should be going to people born in America. Trump has complained that international students at Harvard are harmful because “we have Americans who want to go there.” I would say that neither Silicon Valley nor Harvard would be what they are without being able to attract the world’s best talent, but they clearly don’t agree.
Even if they were right (they aren’t), however, science can’t flourish without government support. Research is the classic example of a “public good” that won’t be undertaken by private firms seeking profit. And if you combine huge funding cuts with an environment in which scientists are essentially told what conclusions to reach, that’s pretty much the end of science in America.
And maybe MAGA is OK with that. Science has this awkward tendency to tell you things you didn’t want to know and give you answers you didn’t want. The Trump administration may pretend to want better science, but at a fundamental level MAGA dislikes and distrusts the very idea of science.
And sooner than many imagine, there won’t be much science in America for them to complain about.
MAGA can settle back and read their Bibles, while the rest of the world moves on.
Despite the American Bible-thumpers, America has succeeded *because* of immigration. Except for the Native-Americans, we all immigrated from somewhere (or our ancestors did).
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Robert Reich, 10 Jun 2025: The Coward Goes to War Against America, subtitled “Trump wants Americans to turn violent. We will be steadfast.”
The man who launched an attempted coup on the United States in 2020 and instigated an insurrection at the Capitol that resulted in five deaths now claims that people in Los Angeles are launching an insurrection. They’re not.
Yesterday, the Pentagon activated 700 Marines out of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, to join the 4,000 federalized National Guard’s military occupation of parts of Los Angeles.
I think it was Scott McGrew, the political and tech reporter for the early morning local NBC news (otherwise consisting of traffic reports, weather reports, and traffic accidents, mostly) who clarified that these National Guards were not “sent in” by Trump to California; they were people who were already here. They live here.
Back to Reich:
Trump doesn’t give a damn whether the troops are necessary. Nor does he care how many people are injured or even killed in his raid on Los Angeles. The show of military force is the point. It gives him the appearance of power.
Like any bully, Trump is fundamentally a coward. Humiliated by China, Harvard, the Supreme Court, Elon Musk, and the federal courts, Trump has launched a war inside America on vulnerable people inside America, in a place — California — most of whose inhabitants loathe him.
All of this was manufactured by Trump. It was and is his creation. …
I’m always trying to put current events in larger contexts, larger perspectives. Thus the historical parallels and comparisons, even with, yes, Hitler. (Another Fb post I saw today: some MAGA person is trying to rehabilitate Hitler’s image.) Reich does some of this:
The central struggle of civilization has always been to stop brutality. Unless we prevent the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe.
A civil society is the opposite of what Trump seeks. A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It moves as far as possible away from brutality.
OK, sure. In my terms I see the struggle of civilization as the effort to overcome base human nature, refined for tribal life over hundreds of thousands of years, in order for humans to function in a global world. And yes, in basic terms, that means that, yeah yeah, everyone should live in peace and the strong shouldn’t brutalize the weak. Of course it will never happen. Human nature is inescapable. Except perhaps in pockets, with values driven through education. For a while the US was a pocket of civility. But apparently it’s falling apart, and base human nature is reasserting itself.
Every time the stronger brutalize the weaker — whether it’s Trump and his flunkies bullying immigrants and the state of California, white supremacists bullying Black and Latino people, giant corporations bullying customers with high prices, the wealthy bullying the public to get giant tax cuts, Elon Musk bullying poor people by cutting programs they depend on, police bullying poor Black people, powerful men bullying women through sexual harassment, politicians building their power by bullying racial or ethnic minorities, Netanyahu wiping out Palestinians in Gaza, Putin trying to take over Ukraine — it’s fundamentally the same playbook: Stoke fear. Exploit desperation. Suspend the rule of law. Fan brutality.
Unless the bullies are stopped, an entire society — even the world — can descend into chaos.
Our duty is to stop brutality. Our responsibility is to hold the powerful accountable. Our challenge is to stand up to abuses of power. Our moral obligation is to protect the vulnerable.
This week and through Saturday, protest but please do it peacefully. Do not be provoked into violence. Take videos of any brutality Trump’s agents are wreaking, to show the rest of America and the world. Be smart. Be careful.
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Soundtrack music. Carter Burwell. (Unfortunately broken up into tracks with commercials in between.) The full theme comes in about 1:40.
