Just got the following message from a scientist at a top 25 school....
Richard Hanania@RichardHanania
40 views
Mar 13, 2025
1
Just got the following message from a scientist at a top 25 school. He was one of a handful of scientists at his university who voted for Trump, and reports they're all now completely ashamed of it.
I am an NIH-funded biomedical scientist with conservative leanings. I know at least a dozen scientists (a small closeted minority) who voted for Trump, largely because of frustrations with DEI and extreme wokeness that had permeated every aspect of University life. Each one of us deeply regrets their vote for Trump and are utterly ashamed of it.
We are absolutely horrified at how mindlessly destructive this admin has been to scientific institutions. They are single-handedly destroying the STEM dominance US established over decades.
Average Americans simply do not realize that we are now on the verge of a precipitous decline in STEM. We all admit that the warnings about Trump/MAGA were on target, and the thing we argue about now is whether the damage is even reversible. All the Lefty overreach was annoying as hell but the MAGA disdain for science is 100X worse.
MAGA was already anti-intellectual, but many educated conservatives still held their noses and voted for Trump. DOGE just turned things up to 11, went beyond hostility to wokeness and turned into hostility to science and rational thought more generally. The way that fake news dominates this platform is simply another manifestation of this contempt for the mind.
What a tragedy this has been.
I am an NIH-funded biomedical scientist with conservative leanings. I know at least a dozen scientists (a small closeted minority) who voted for Trump, largely because of frustrations with DEI and extreme wokeness that had permeated every aspect of University life. Each one of us deeply regrets their vote for Trump and are utterly ashamed of it.
We are absolutely horrified at how mindlessly destructive this admin has been to scientific institutions. They are single-handedly destroying the STEM dominance US established over decades.
Average Americans simply do not realize that we are now on the verge of a precipitous decline in STEM. We all admit that the warnings about Trump/MAGA were on target, and the thing we argue about now is whether the damage is even reversible. All the Lefty overreach was annoying as hell but the MAGA disdain for science is 100X worse.
MAGA was already anti-intellectual, but many educated conservatives still held their noses and voted for Trump. DOGE just turned things up to 11, went beyond hostility to wokeness and turned into hostility to science and rational thought more generally. The way that fake news dominates this platform is simply another manifestation of this contempt for the mind.
What a tragedy this has been.
2
More on Musk’s contempt for the intellect here. The irony of course is his wealth was built on the back of government subsidies, as he now seeks to defund all other scientific projects going forward. richardhanania.com/p/liberals-onl…