At long last, there is hope in the United States, and gods willing, hope for the redemption of science in our fair land. The resurrected Trump regency has purged the evil of “DEI” racism from the government, and it certainly looks like the very sensible Jay Bhattacharya will inherit the head position at the NIH, which is wonderful news after a decade of full spectrum dominance of federal science funding agencies by social justice warriors and regime apparatchiks.

So I’m hopeful… but also, those few of us right-wingers who have survived in academia to this late date are feeling the boot on our necks just as heavily as our erstwhile enemies these days:

• All funding has been effectively throttled pending review for DEI-themed civil rights violations — a review that is happening at a snail’s pace because large chunks of the staff at NIH and NSF have been pre-emptively fired.
• The administration has decreed a cap on “indirect” payments to universities of 15%, which will eviscerate the infrastructure at every R1 institution in the US. For those of you who don’t know, “indirects” are basically a tax that universities charge to academic researchers, where a percentage of your total funding is confiscated by the university to pay — well, nobody knows exactly what it pays for. Some combination of “keeping the lights on” and “paying the university race commissars to doxx you on bluesky” is probably accurate. But these payments, sometimes representing more than 50% of the total grant award, are the lifeblood of a research university, and without them — well, the university DEI vice-president what be able to buy xer new shark tank, and we can’t have that, can we?
• And looming over all of that is a threat to massively tax university endowments — akin to Henry VIII confiscating all the gold from Catholic monasteries in England after his spat with the Pope, this would result in the near total annihilation of the major research university as it has existed in the United States for the past 80 years.

Tl;dr: there is a scorched earth campaign sweeping across the American university today, led by a wild-eyed mob of nationalists with an axe to grind. At this point it’s indiscriminate — and I understand why, because the leftist lawfare campaign that throttled the first Trump presidency would chew up a more moderate reform movement before it could get started. But it’s a shame, because American science was, at least until the Great Awokening around 2014, a historical marvel and one of the greatest achievements of the human species. It still can be, but only if we can survive the righteous fury of the present jihad.

I’ve said before on this blog that the only way we can get out of the corner our country has painted itself into — at least without bloodshed — is for one political faction to be ideologically defeated thoroughly enough that it actually believes it was wrong and asks for forgiveness. With Trump’s crushing defeat of the historically catastrophic Biden junta and the whirlwind blitzkrieg of his first month in office, I think it is safe to say that the race communist ideology of the Woke Democrats has been quite thoroughly defeated. Now, the losing side must submit and acknowledge the crimes it committed, or else it will face the same brutal and total victor’s justice that their ideological predecessors, also race-obsessed warmongers with a hatred of free speech, faced at Nuremberg. But alas, the defeated enemy remains so mired in xer own propaganda that xe doesn’t even understand what motivates the victors.

So I offer the following extremely well-written short essay to those of you who may be hate-reading this blog — or for those of you who are fellow scientists on the “right side of history” who want a good way to explain to your shell-shocked colleagues “why this is happening to you”. And I also offer it to my readers who, like me, remain deeply angry about what scientists did to the world — and to the US in particular — in the COVID years, as a plea for why academic science is worth saving. I hope you will all read it and share it widely — I did not write this (I originally saw it on Steve Sailer’s Substack but lifted the text from here) but I agree with every bit of it, and I hope everyone on both sides of the aisle who wants to see America return to its rightful spot as the greatest research power on Earth will read it and take it to heart:

An opinion piece by anonymous scientists.

Proposed Title: Make Biology Great Again, Mr. President

Five years ago, COVID, the deadliest pandemic since the Spanish flu, swept the globe. Optimists predicted that a remedy for COVID could soon be found in the United States. By the end of 2020, these observers were vindicated by Operation Warp Speed, a triumph of American science, medicine, and logistics. Although vaccines were also developed in other countries, it was the American vaccines that were most widely deployed, saving millions of lives here and abroad. Because President Trump has been denied any political benefit from Warp Speed, his oversight of it qualifies as the most virtuous act of his presidency so far.

Whether he advances his legacy will depend in part on how he reforms the National Institutes of Health (NIH). His aides and interim appointees have made serious errors overseeing NIH, apparently in a hamfisted effort to eliminate two real, grave threats to American excellence: waste and wokeness. Thousands of researchers at NIH have been fired, supposedly but implausibly for cause. The entire NIH system for supporting university research has been disrupted by sudden and drastic cuts in proposed funding. It is difficult not to suspect an element of vindictiveness in these indiscriminate mass layoffs and cutbacks.

The biomedical community, however, must recognize where this vengeful mood comes from. It is righteous anger directed at NIH and life scientists more generally. Although scientists should be thanked and honored for developing effective COVID therapeutics, it is quite possible that other scientists created COVID in the first place and then concealed their culpability from President Trump and the nation. The negligent release of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus killed millions of people, cost trillions of dollars, laid kindling for the political firestorms of 2020, and perhaps changed the result of its U.S. presidential election. If one denies the possibility that COVID arose from scientific irresponsibility, one then has to explain the behavior of health authorities of both China and America that seems to betray consciousness of guilt. Subsequent responses to COVID by American biomedical authorities were also objectionable: requiring masking despite its questionable efficacy, closing schools despite the harm done to children, and barring people from their churches and outdoor recreations while encouraging mass left-wing protests.

However understandable disenchantment with NIH may be, such blind lashing out at the researchers working there or supported by it must be condemned. The vast majority of the rank and file had no part in the malfeasance outlined above. The history of German physics and Russian biology in the first half of the 20th century shows that scientific excellence is hard to build, but terribly easy to destroy. Even if U.S. researchers depart for other countries, as their German and Russian predecessors did, there is no guarantee that they will rebuild the excellence that has won America more than 100 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine. More Chinese Americans have won scientific Nobel Prizes than PRC citizens, though the former are a mere 1/200th of the latter. Of 28 highly transformative medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 1985 and 2002, 80% arose from basic biological research conducted decades before FDA approval. Extinguishing biomedical science in America may plunge the whole world into mediocrity, and deprive it of a precious resource that has repeatedly saved and extended lives everywhere.

We propose to treat NIH’s misbehavior in the way that a prudent commander treats a mutiny. Examples should be made of the worst offenders. The origin of COVID must be rigorously investigated, and if any American scientists are found to have engaged in misconduct, a select few should be dismissed or even delivered to the Department of Justice. Social-justice commissars must be sent packing. All other NIH employees should be reinstated and allowed to resume their legitimate scientific activities. We also propose that revisions of NIH’s support to universities should be done in a measured way that allows reform and improvement rather than capricious destruction. As part of this rapprochement, scientists must recognize that Republicans have built a broad coalition of Americans from all races who want the country’s biomedical institutions cleansed of irresponsible scientific behavior and committed to politically impartial scientific judgment. If biomedical scientists embrace these goals, they will win back the trust whose absence is now derailing their work and causing laypeople to spurn professional medical guidance.

During the Civil War, America began the land-grant system that made college education possible for the children of farmers and factory workers. During the Great Depression, America founded NIH, which led to ninety years of biological innovation. In 2025, America again faces crisis. But we are a country that builds for the future even when others might despair. Let us renew NIH so that it continues its work for the benefit of America, and of all nations.