War on Science: Urgent call to action

If you want the quick and dirty, scroll down to the “call to action” headline.

The United States is undergoing a version of the “economic shock therapy” that has been used to privatise economies and establish authoritarian capitalist/oligarchic rule in a number of countries that went too far to the left. If you want an in-depth understanding of the subject, Naomi Klein’s definitive work on the subject is still free in audiobook form on youtube. Basically, the strategy is to force through a whole bunch of changes all at once, with the most important being the transfer of public institutions and resources into private hands:

Shock therapy proponents Sachs and Lipton argued in 1990: “The great conundrum is how to privatize a vast array of firms in a manner that is equitable, swift, politically viable, and likely to create an effective structure of corporate control.”[2]: 4  They recommended that the pace “must be rapid, but not reckless”, and should “probably be carried out by many means”.[2]: 4  In the view of shock therapy proponents, trade liberalization requires domestic price liberalization first; thus a “big bang” in price liberalization underlying both privatization and trade liberalization forms the “shock” in the moniker “shock therapy”.[2]: 4 

In practice, the rapid application of shock therapy proved generally disastrous in the post-Soviet states.[2]: 4–6 

It’s something that may result in investment and growth, simply because they want control over those public resources and and the power that brings. In many ways, it is simply the looting of a country, and the establishment or reinforcement of the kind of inequality that capitalists and their acolytes demand. It’s done quickly, as smash-and-grab thefts tend to be, and because so much is being done all at once, it’s difficult for the opposition to organize in time to stop it. Even if one project is blocked, others will get by.

People outside the US, and those within the country who are not themselves politically active, often seem to think that because the regime is still in power, and still doing colossal harm, USians aren’t doing anything about it. The reality is that while more needs to be done people are working in opposition. It’s just that the corporate media mostly isn’t covering it, and none of it looks like a revolutionary army marching on the capitol. It’s also not necessarily directed at the problems that are biggest in the headlines. There’s no easy way to remove a fascist regime, once it gets in.

One of my bigger worries for the future is that a lot of the “smashing” being done is designed to make it harder for the US to recover from this nightmare, and harder for USians to see, understand, and oppose current and future efforts at progress. The war on science and education have both been going on for decades, but as with everything else happening right now, it has escalated to an absurd degree, which brings me to the

Call to Action!

The Academy of Natural Sciences is one of the oldest institutions in the United States, and it houses a vast collection of unique and irreplaceable specimens, some collected before it was founded 214 years ago. It is important historically, and it is important to ongoing research and to the ongoing education of the public.

So naturally, it is scheduled to be destroyed.

On September 1st, 2026, Drexel University and the Board of the Academy of Natural Sciences announced the closure of the public museum on the Parkway. The last day is scheduled to be Sunday, September 27, 2026. This is two years shy of the 200th anniversary of the 214-year-old institution’s doors opening to the public. We do not accept closure. The story is not over yet, and you can help change the ending.

It’s hard to overstate what a bad idea this is, and I’d be hard-pressed to really do the topic justice. Thankfully, I don’t have to. The excellent YouTube historian Miniminuteman has a breakdown on what’s happening, as well as a detailed walkthrough of what you, yes YOU can do about it:

For those who cannot watch or listen to the video, for whatever reason, I’m going to copy and paste the steps for saving America’s oldest natural history museum:

HOW TO SAVE THE ACADEMY: Step 1: Go to this link https://save-the-academy.org/ Step 2: Sign this petition https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/p… Step 3: Email Drexel University’s president Merlo’s office: president@drexel.edu In this email CC dew39@drexel.edu and hyb23@drexel.edu (Drexel’s Community Relations Department and Financial Officer & Treasurer) BE PROFESSIONAL AND RESPECTFUL! Pick one of these topics:

  • The danger to the collections
  • A specific artifact that stood out to you
  • Concern over the lack of public engagement
  • Think of the children
  • Or anything else about this situation that stood out to you

Write a little bit about it in your own words and add it to this email:

To whom it may concern, I am writing to express my opposition to the closure of the oldest natural history museum in the Americas, The Academy of Natural Sciences. The museum and its collections represent an irreplaceable part of our history, as a nation and as a continent, and the decision to close it is misguided and against the will of the people who the museum exists to serve.

This decision was made without consulting the people or attempting to find a reasonable path forward to keep The Academy open. Beyond the obvious damage to the priceless artifacts within The Academy, this decision is also guaranteed to become an enormous stain on the reputation of Drexel that the people on whom your institution relies will not soon forget.

I stand with the thousands of others who advise you to overturn the decision to close The Academy at the end of the month, provide more transparency about your motivation for closing it and work with the people, community, institutions and city of Philadelphia to find a path forward to keep The Academy open for generations of curious minds to come. Do the right thing,

Send to president@drexel.edu, dew39@drexel.edu and hyb23@drexel.edu

Step 4: submit a written comment to the mayors office
You can use this one (but change it up a bit):
I want to write to express my concern over Drexels’ decision to close the Academy of Natural Sciences. I believe that this decision will do immense harm to our national heritage and community. Myself and many others implore you to fight to preserve this irreplaceable institution so it may continue to serve the community for years to come.

Do the right thing,

Step 5: express your support to the city council members fighting to save the Academy: https://phlcouncil.com/council-members/ Or contact your stat rep: https://www.palegis.us/find-my-legisl…

Step 6 (if you are brave): Call Drexel University’s president Merlo’s office to express your concerns BE PROFESSIONAL AND RESPECTFUL! +1-215-895-2100

I would also recommend you check out Miniminuteman’s work, because he makes great stuff.

 

It’s hard to know exactly what will happen to the contents of the museum if this goes through. There’s no question that some would be destroyed. It’s also likely that some will be sold off to private collectors, because that’s more or less what’s happening to all the public resources of the United States right now.

Do what you can, and do it as soon as you’re able, because we only have till the end of September.

Repetition

What does “self-defense” mean?

In general, I think of it as the protection of one’s self against an attacker. It can be against verbal/social attacks, or it can be against direct physical violence. In either case, the “defense” bit means that the primary goal is to make the attack stop, or to at least avoid harm from it. The defense is generally expected to be proportional to the attack, so where it might cover lethal violence in response to a lethal attack, it certainly won’t cover killing someone to “defend” yourself against slander, or in response to a thrown snowball.

There’s another perspective, though, that has been normalized in the US, which is that self defense can or even should be disproportionate. The reasoning is generally that the goal is not just to stop the current attack, but also to stop all future attacks. It is also an opportunity for violence, for sadism, and for domination. One example from recent US political history was given to us by the Senate candidacy of Maine politician Graham Platner. He allegedly told a girlfriend that his plan, should a burglar ever break into his home while he’s there, was to rape that burglar as an act of domination. I don’t know how widespread that specific “self-defense” fantasy is in the US, but things of that scale are pretty common. Think the numerous death traps offered to us as innocent comedy by Home Alone. Think the “stand your ground” laws that allow people in the US to use lethal force in self-defense, and all the guys who fantasize about doing just that. Think Trayvon Martin being killed in “self-defense” by an armed man who stalked him through his neighborhood.

Or think bigger. Think the War on Terror, supposedly waged to defend the US against future terrorist attacks by invading and occupying Afghanistan, and then Iraq. Think about the people in America who are still insisting that Israel is merely defending itself against Hamas as it commits genocide.

Think about America’s punitive approach to crime, where even fairly minor transgressions can get you thrown into prison, where everyone expects and accepts that you will be abused and possibly killed by guards or fellow inmates.

Our understanding of what behavior is appropriate is generally shaped by the messages and actions we see repeated around us, and sometimes those messages are put there deliberately, to influence us, and to adjust our expectations and beliefs.

Those deliberate messages are called “propaganda”.

Propaganda is any form of communication designed to spread or reinforce a particular message or idea. The term is most often associated with lies, but it’s really a value-neutral thing. Propaganda is a tool that can be used for good or for ill, and it is a very powerful tool at that. Nobody is immune to it, yourself included, even when you know it’s propaganda.

It’s also something that, in my lifetime, has been used far more effectively by the right than by the left (in the American political spectrum), which has been a source of frustration for me for at least a decade. It often seems as though the study and use of propaganda is seen by Democrats as dishonorable, and for a long time I saw that as part of the incompetence and fecklessness of the party’s leadership. These days I think the reality is that they’re fine using propaganda, or any other tool, it’s just that they didn’t want to use it to further progressive causes.

They’ll go all-in on insisting that every conversation about Israel begin with an almost ritualistic denunciation of Hamas and affirmation of Israel’s right to defend itself, ensuring that Palestinians are always framed as the aggressors. From there any suggestion that Israel might have done something wrong, or that the US should stop funding its war machine leads to a repeat of the opening ritual, and all of that rests on the preexisting assumptions about the meaning of self-defense, and about the appropriate use of violence.

They use propaganda when it comes to progressive causes too. Take universal healthcare. When Medicare for All has been brought up with people like Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden, their response has been to talk about the cost and taxes, sometimes with a wistful “it’d be nice, but…” It sounds like they’re just avoiding the conversation, but what they’re actually doing is repeating the (false) notion that universal healthcare would be a huge financial burden on top of those already weighing down the American people. They could point out the obvious fact that most of the world gets better results for much lower prices, and that it’s actually far cheaper and more user-friendly to have a universal system, but instead they talk about obstacles that primarily exist in people’s minds because of how often they’re repeated.

And repetition is the core of propaganda. If your propaganda isn’t getting repeated and spread, then it fails as propaganda. For something that’s less part of the air we breath than how society views defensive violence, take the famous line from the OJ Simpson trial: “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit!”. It’s catchy. It’s easy to remember and to repeat, and it carries with it the message that the jury doesn’t have a choice in the matter. If the glove doesn’t fit, (none of the other evidence matters, therefor) you must acquit.

With the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even as the justifications shifted from one lie to another, there was one consistent justification that hinged on one truth, repeated constantly: Saddam Hussein was a really bad person. He was an oppressive dictator who had used chemical weapons! Are you seriously defending him?

Never mind that the US routinely partners with sadistic, brutal dictators. Never mind that the US used to work with Hussein, and was actively helping him as he used those chemical weapons.

The fact that all of this has been more effectively used by the right has been a subject of some discussion, but I have a new (to me, at least) perspective on it.

The general explanation is that reality is complex and sometimes difficult to understand or explain, and the right is just far more willing to lie. This means two things. The first is that those of us who care about the truth are faced with the much more difficult task of debunking the lies. The second is that, having shed the need to be truthful or accurate, the right is free to focus all of their energy on crafting material that are easy to understand, remember, and repeat. These are both true, and it is also true that the right effectively has infinite money with which to pay people to come up with propaganda to further their goals. When you are representing established wealth, power, and culture, you’re playing propaganda on easy mode.

There is, however, another factor, and that is capacity for endless repetition.

I’ve seen a couple versions of a message floating around (good propaganda, it seems), addressing the age-old conservative complaint that academia is full of liberals and leftists. There are absolutely conservatives in academia, even in the social sciences, but it’s true that they’re in the minority. Some of that is because studying the world and being exposed to a diversity of thoughts and opinions tends to pull people to the left, but some of it is simply that conservatives generally aren’t drawn to academia. They may have curiosity about cultural critique, or ecology, or historical analysis, but they don’t generally have enough to want to make a career studying it. As others have pointed out, complaining about the fact that there aren’t as many conservative humanities professors is a bit like complaining about the fact that the owners of car dealerships are more likely to be on the right than the left. It’s not that there’s some plot to keep people on the left out of the industry, it’s that people on the left don’t usually want to do that.

In general, in addition to their difficulty with the truth, people on the right seem to be far more willing to do and say the same thing, over and over and over again, sometimes for their entire lives.

I’ve been struggling to write for the blog the past couple weeks, because I can’t think of anything to say I haven’t already said many times. The UN announced that it is no longer possible to keep the planet’s warming at or below 1.5°C, and I started writing about it, but I had this overwhelming feeling that I was just writing because I felt pressure to post something, and that seemed like a good subject. I didn’t really have much to say about it. I think they should have made that call years ago, accounting for climate science plus our political and economic systems. I think they’re downplaying the state of things, as they have done for longer than I’ve been alive, and they should treat this as the biggest crisis in our species’ history, because it is. We need to be doing more, and at the individual level, that means solidarity, and organizing with others so that we can wield our collective power.

And frankly, it’s boring to keep finding slightly different ways to say that, especially when it’s to roughly the same audience. I lack Cato the Elder’s tenacity, it seems, and when it comes to spreading any message, that’s a problem.

The upside is that we tend to have much better art on the left, partly for the same reason, and good art can also sometimes be good propaganda, especially if the ideas you want to spread are things like justice, hope, introspection, empathy, and equality.

Anyway, the answer to all of this is to organize, build solidarity, build community, and do art. We have the power to change the world, but only if we can get enough of us working together.