I’ve been getting reassuring emails from my university to let me know that they have assembled a team to respond to the federal government shut down of NIH and NSF funded research. In case you hadn’t heard, they canceled review panels at NSF and suspended research at NIH. They made the uncertainty that has always haunted research funding far more shaky. This is a warning shot — they’re going to make everyone conscious of the fact that the Trump team, a collection of idiots with no qualifications in science to throttle any and all science they don’t like.
We already know what they don’t like. They’ve been signaling all along.
They don’t like climate science. They don’t like vaccines. They don’t like evolution. They don’t like human sexuality. If they have to shut down all of science to kill those subjects they don’t like, they will. The Republicans don’t care, they’re going to be smug and happy about destroying the institutions that have been built up since WWII, that enabled the post-war economic boom, that is the heart of our country’s health and safety, because they’ve weaponized the general public’s fear of change and progress to get elected. The science establishment is fragile and easily broken; we rely on chains of people training and building on prior work, and knocking out four years of research does more than cause a hiatus, it breaks a generation of progress, and you can’t get it back. It means scientists will move to countries with more reliable support.
But that’s not what worries me the most. They don’t like immigrants. Their solution is to put them in shackles, load them on busses and planes, and send them off to some other country that doesn’t want them either and is incapable of absorbing the sudden influx, and will turn them away, giving Trump an excuse to declare a trade war. Meanwhile, we have to do something with these people, and the solution in the works is to pay private prisons to house them in “detention centers”.
That’s a euphemism. The traditional name for them is concentration camps. The Trump White House wants to put 10-15 million people in camps, ideally prior to expelling them from the country, which they can’t realistically do. I have a pessimistic prediction to make.
We pack a few million malnourished people into cramped concentration camps, which is where the next great epidemic starts. We’ll have crippled the CDC and the NIH, so we can’t treat them; in addition the administration is ideologically opposed to sane medical treatment. They are treated with horse dewormer, or whatever quackery flits through the brain of Trump or RFK jr. The great dying begins.
The reasonable response to all the corpses piling up is to build ovens in our concentration camps. The circle is complete. We will have become Nazis in everything but the name. Don’t worry about that name, though, we have an alternative all ready to go. Four letters, two syllables, our contribution to the terminology of evil: MAGA. Don’t call them Nazis, when we can accurately call them MAGA. It’s the same thing.
This is my prophecy. It is what shall be within a few years. At the same time, the USA will begin the quest for Lebensraum, I mean, “national security”. Greenland and Canada are in our sights. The wars will begin, just as they did in the 1930s.
The world can find solace in the fact that this Reich begins their expansion by gutting science and technology, crippling ourselves at the onset and telling ourselves that god is with us. As a bonus, we will have swapped out our industrial and economic strength for useless AI and cryptocurrencies.
Sorry, world.