Science Under Siege: America’s War on Knowledge
Right now, science in the United States is under attack. It is not just being debated, it is being attacked and diminished at the hands of our current administration. False lies are being promoted while ignorance is being celebrated. And history has shown us time and time again that when factual information and education are dismantled and prohibited, it leads to absolute control of the masses by those in power.
Today, I’m covering current events in the United States and connecting them with historical events to set out red flags for the world to hear and see. As I’ve mentioned before, history shows us the red flags of danger. And I’m a firm believer that we must heed our histories so that we are not doomed to repeat them. Because when politics attempts to hinder education, it can kill science.
In the sixth century, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I ordered the closure of Plato’s Academy in Athens. In the seventeenth century, the church accused Galileo Galilei of heresy and sentenced him to house arrest for his heliocentric views, which held that the Earth and other planets orbited the Sun. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Soviet Union’s Lysenkoism killed genetics in favor of political lies and ultimately starved millions. Truth has often been suppressed, leading to the demise of developmental science. These historical examples show us that every time science was shackled, society paid the price in famine, war, and stagnation.
Currently, in the United States, universities are being sued, funding is being removed, and international students are either being arrested or forced to leave. Students showing up for school are watching their parents be detained by masked, fake law enforcement referred to as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. Books are being banned across the country. Furthermore, recent federal health policies have terminated funding for mRNA vaccines and further research, removed COVID-19 recommendations, and canceled flu-related meetings, thereby endangering the health of United States citizens.
And as we now fall under the seventh month of the current administration, scientists are either leaving or considering leaving the country. According to The Guardian, Aix-Marseille University has opened a scientific asylum program, which has drawn nearly 300 applicants. Among those applicants, thirty-nine American scholars were shortlisted. Among them is Brian Sandberg, a professor of history at Northern Illinois University. In an interview with The Guardian, he states that American higher education is being targeted and is being destroyed.[1]
Academia Losing Funding
Doctor Sandberg is correct in his statement. And although the damage may be reparable, it will undoubtedly leave a trail of destruction in its wake that could take up to a decade or more to restore.
As of the date of this recording, over fifteen public and private universities across the country are being sued and are under federal oversight, including Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University.
According to the Public Broadcasting System, our federal government stripped Columbia University of $400 million in grants and contracts. Without those funds, laboratories would go dark, graduate students would scatter, and the university’s place as a global research powerhouse would collapse. Columbia’s leaders faced a blunt choice: resist and risk institutional ruin or comply and survive under federal oversight. When Columbia University agreed to a $220 million settlement with the Trump administration in 2025, it wasn’t framed as a surrender. Administrators described it as a reaffirmation of academic freedom and a necessary compromise to maintain the institution’s operations. The settlement required Columbia to adopt the government’s definition of antisemitism, submit to federal monitoring, and discipline its own students in ways aligned with White House priorities.
These moves by a government feel unprecedented, but history tells us otherwise. Power has always known how to control knowledge.
In the sixth century, Emperor Justinian I closed the Academy in Athens, not with soldiers storming classrooms, but with a decree that cut off its lifeblood. The emperor cut off the school’s funding and protection, causing philosophers to scatter into exile. Centuries of inquiry vanished from the Byzantine world, including Hypatia’s teachings.
In nineteenth-century Russia, Tsar Nicholas I did not need to burn books to weaken universities. He controlled funding, censored professors, and demanded that education serve “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” The result was intellectual stagnation and eventually, rebellion.
And in 2025, universities in the USA are learning the same lesson: when rulers want to silence ideas, they rarely need to burn libraries. They simply turn off the money.
History shows us this bargain is always the same. When institutions trade independence for survival, they may save their bodies, but they surrender part of their soul.
And Columbia was not the only university. Brown University and Harvard also came under scrutiny. Like Colombia, Brown University chose survival mode and agreed to pay for Rhode Island workforce developmental programs to restore the funding. The price tag on that agreement was $50 million. But it wasn’t just the price tag that came with this agreement. Brown and Columbia also stated they would provide the administration with their admissions data as it relates to race and gender. Let that sink in. Race and gender. So, current policies are affectingstudents of color and the LGBTQ+ community.
Harvard, by contrast, stood firm. In April 2025, the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in grants and contracts, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon bluntly declaring that Harvard would receive no future federal research funding. [2] Harvard immediately launched a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that the freeze and conditions were unconstitutional coercion. Furthermore, Harvard’s president Alan Garber responded forcefully, stating, “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” [3] [4]
The pressure escalated quickly. A joint federal task force moved to terminate hundreds of millions more in grants, including funding for vital health research in cancer, obesity, and neurodegenerative disease. Rather than capitulate, Harvard announced it would funnel $250 million of its own money to sustain research while litigation continued. It was a costly but deliberate bet on autonomy over accommodation. [5] [6]
Still, even as students, faculty, and alumni urged resistance, reports suggest Harvard is edging toward a $500 million settlement that could impose government oversight. The battle has become symbolic: a test of whether one of America’s most powerful universities can withstand political extortion without sacrificing its soul.
Thus, the United States government under the new administration is pressuringour universities, which in turn are decimating our scientific advancements.
And this is not the first time universities have been compromised or pressured by political forces. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany purged its universities of “Jewish science,” driving out some of the greatest minds of the century, like Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, and James Franck, who carried their brilliance to other countries. Germany, once the world’s scientific powerhouse, deliberately crippled its own future in service to ideology. Three decades later, Mao’s Cultural Revolution gutted Chinese higher education, shuttered schools, persecuted professors, and scattered an entire generation of students into the countryside. China paid for that lost decade of knowledge with stalled progress that would take years to recover.
So, when we look at Columbia’s capitulation, Brown’s compromise, and Harvard’s precarious resistance, we should hear echoes of that same historical rhythm. The methods and the results are always the same, and ultimately, knowledge is throttled, innovation slows down, and a society that once thrived on discovery finds itself gasping for air. History’s verdict is clear: when governments extort their universities, they may silence dissent for several years, but they impoverish the nation for generations to come.
And what is the endgame in all of this? Ultimately, the curriculum will be rewritten to fit the ideologies of centralized authority.
Curriculum Rewritten to Fit Ideology
Universities are where evidence is made; schools are where it is taught. When rulers cannot silence the labs outright, they move to rewrite the lesson plans. This is not new; it is one of the oldest plays in the book of authoritarianism.
The destruction of books dates back to 213 BCE, when the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, following the recommendation of his chief adviser, Li Si, ordered that all historical texts be destroyed so that scholars would not be able to compare his reign to that of previous kings.[7] In 391 CE, in Alexandria, Egypt, when Hypatia was flourishing as a professor, Pope Theophilus ordered the destruction of the Serapeum and its library. His intent was to limit access to information to the pagans of the city. [8]
We know where this goes. We’ve seen it before. And this year, in January 2025, the White House re-established the 1776 Commission. It launched an order framed as “ending radical indoctrination in Kindergarten through twelfth grade,” a move designed to steer history and civics toward a state-sanctioned “patriotic” narrative. At the same time, the Department of Education announced actions to eliminate language and programs across its footprint that address diversity, equity, and inclusion. These are also known as DEI programs. This message indicates which types of content and training will be favored or frozen. These are levers on what appears in classrooms, who trains teachers, and what materials districts feel safe adopting.[9]
Furthermore, as I write this during the week of August 18, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education quietly rescinded federal guidance that had long required schools to provide strong bilingual and English learner programs, effectively stripping protections for nearly five million students. The move was accompanied by significant staff cuts to the Office of English Language Acquisition and signals a shift toward an English-only policy, despite America’s multilingual reality. Advocates warn that without federal oversight or funding, districts may reduce or abandon bilingual education altogether, leaving immigrant and multilingual students at a stark disadvantage.[10]
The pattern repeats across centuries. In early modern Europe, the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books constrained what could be printed and read, shaping curricula in Catholic universities for generations. When the index says a text is off-limits, courses quietly stop assigning it, and self-censorship becomes policy.
In 1930s Nazi Germany, the Hitler regime rewrote textbooks to enshrine racial ideology. Biology became eugenics, history glorified destiny, and literature purged “undesirable” authors. The Nazi mission was not education; it was formation.[11] Likewise, the Heritage Foundation’s ideological reach extends beyond policy papers and into the classroom through structured fellowship programs. Its Heritage Academy Fellowship, for example, is marketed as an eight-week course in “America’s founding principles” and public policy. Still, critics note that the curriculum emphasizes Heritage’s conservative worldview and trains participants to carry that perspective into their academic and professional lives. By pairing fellows with Heritage scholars and policy experts, the program operates less as a neutral educational institution and more as an ideological pipeline that shapes the next generation of conservative leaders.[12]
Listen for the rhyme today. In April 2025, the White House issued an accreditation order promising to hold accreditors “accountable” for “ideological overreach.” This bureaucratic language grants political appointees new influence over what constitutes acceptable programs and learning outcomes, so that when accreditors change, the syllabi follow. [13]
Curriculum control also arises from targeting who gets to teach and what support they can utilize. Recent federalorders against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, known as DEI, have moved from slogans to enforcement. The U.S. Education Department is now targeting the DEI practices in universities. It is making public demands for policy rewrites and mandatory “corrections.” And literally as I write this, the Department of Education announced today that George Mason University violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by illegally using diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. Thus, the academic practices of accepting diversity, implementing equity, and embracing inclusion are now illegal in the United States.[14]
Furthermore, authoritarian curriculum-making extends beyond the humanities. In the 1930s Soviet Union, Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, with the help of Soviet governance, replaced genetics with an ideology-compliant pseudoscience known as Lysenkoism. Students learned false biology, and as a result, farms and lives paid the price. When politics dictates the answers, science class becomes a loyalty oath.[15]
We can hear the echo in U.S. research policy. In August 2025, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to proceed, at least for now, with terminating hundreds of U.S. National Institutes of Health grants it linked to DEI, after a volley of executive orders. Furthermore, as of this month, the president has implemented new procedures for his senior appointees. These methods include awarding and denying federal grants at the discretion of political authorities. Under recent executive orders, they will review awarded grants and even terminate existing grants as they see fit. As a result, our new government rule is demanding that politics usurp peer review. The current method of our new administration is to starve the inquiry it dislikes, then call the resulting silence “balance.” The shift does not stay in the lab; it flows downstream into syllabi, majors, and which courses can still be offered.
This historical red flag is this: Governments rebrand censorship as “patriotic education,” recast inclusion as “unlawful discrimination,” and pressure accreditors to police “ideology.” It’s a three-step process: investigate, freeze, and terminate until faculty members learn which courses are most prone to trouble. Though it may not be a bonfire of books, it is a thermostat, turned low enough that entire subjects fall dormant. The syllabus is not a stack of pages; it is a map of what a society permits itself to know.
This particular red flag in history has warned us that once a state claims power over what can be taught, recovery will take years, even after policies change. In Germany, the denazification of the country took decades. The social healing process is long-term. Sadly, the United States is in for a long, uncomfortable, dangerous ride.
Next, we follow that map into the classroom: where “balanced perspectives” become false equivalence, where a unit on climate or race can be rewritten by press release, and where the cost of political comfort is measured in what students never learn.
Universities are the engines of evidence. When a governing body throttles them, one of the first smokes from the hood is climate science. The same levers that include funding freezes, political litmus tests, and manufactured “balance” now target the labs that track heat, model storms, and measure smoke in our lungs.
The Silencing
Climate scientists are being silenced not by a single gag order, but by a web of policy moves that remove the tools, erase the data, and punish the people who produce it. In August, the administration rolled back scientific-integrity protections at the Environmental Protection Agency, known as the EPA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as the NOAA, is reverting to weaker, pre-2021 rules and scrubbing strengthened language from agency sites, making it easier for political appointees to meddle with research and researchers.[16]
The money and missions that make climate facts visible are being targeted next. A July budget blueprint zeros out federal climate-research lines for Fiscal Year 2026, sending agencies a clear signal to freeze projects now. At the EPA, the government has moved to dismantle the Office of Research and Development while cutting overall staff, kneecapping the agency’s internal science bench. At NASA, the White House has moved to end the Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions (OCO‑2 and OCO‑3), our most precise, space-based measures of atmospheric CO₂, removing a cornerstone of global carbon monitoring.[17]
Silencing also happens by deleting the record. In July, reporters documented that the National Climate Assessment portal went dark, its support contract was canceled, and hundreds of NCA contributors were dismissed, gutting the congressionally mandated assessment’s public presence even as outside archives tried to keep the reports available.[18] The governance has likewise made key climate reports harder to find, burying or removing government web pages that previously centralized datasets and regional impact summaries.
Step back and the pattern is unmistakable: weaken integrity rules so interference is easier; defund or cancel the satellites and labs that generate inconvenient measurements; delete or hide the public portals that let communities, journalists, and planners see the numbers. That is not debate. It is an act of sabotage against the scientific system itself. The result is fewer measurements, fewer models, fewer public datasets, and fewer scientists left in government to speak plainly about rising risks.
If a government dismantles scientific integrity, cancels carbon-monitoring satellites, and pulls the plug on the National Climate Assessment, it doesn’t just change the narrative; it blinds the country. That blindness doesn’t make heat waves cooler or wildfires slower. It only makes us slower to see them coming.
In the end, this isn’t a dispute over facts; it’s a struggle over power. The winners of delay, fossil-fuel incumbents, their political patrons, and the media machines they bankroll, profit now from every paused satellite, every muted report, and every scientist pushed to the margins. Short election cycles reward officials who trade long-term safety for near-term optics. At the same time, culture-war narratives recast basic measurements as partisan heresy to keep coalitions loyal and doubt alive. Sunk costs and captive regulators lock in yesterday’s infrastructure, so that “balance” becomes the story and silence becomes the policy. And a steady drizzle of disinformation turns uncertainty into a business model, buying time for the status quo while the climate clock runs down. That is why the tools are being stripped. The data erased: not because the science is weak, but because the people who profit today are strong, and the stories that protect their power are louder, for now, than the alarms scientists are trying to sound.
The Endangering of Health Experts
And when scientific research becomes an area that is entirely in danger of being obliterated, the healthcare system is soon to follow, which could ultimately affect the world. On August 15, 2025, gunfire rang out at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. The shooter, a 42-year-old man, had convinced himself that the hardships in his life stemmed from receiving a COVID-19 vaccine years earlier. In his delusion, he decided that the scientists who studied public health were his enemies. He entered the headquarters armed, and when the violence ended, Officer David Rose had been killed.
This was not random. Investigators found social media posts where the gunman parroted anti-vaccine talking points circulating online, many echoed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current head of Health and Human Services (HHS). In the days after the shooting, more than 750 HHS employees signed a letter begging Kennedy to stop spreading falsehoods about vaccines and public health measures. Their plea was straightforward. They told him that his rhetoric fuels hostility, and hostility is turning deadly. Yet Kennedy continued, giving interviews that cast more suspicion on vaccines and repeating claims that embolden conspiracy theories rather than calm them.[19]
Think about the danger this creates for scientists today: a reality where simply publishing findings or working in a lab can make you a target for violence. This isn’t the first time scientists have faced mortal risk for their work. History gives us a chilling precedent. In July 1941, during the German occupation of Poland, the Nazi Squadron carried out what came to be called the Massacre of Lwów Professors in what is now Lviv, Ukraine. Twenty-five Polish academics, professors, physicians, and scientists at Lwów’s universities were executed alongside family members and guests. Their only crime was belonging to the intelligentsia, a class the regime saw as dangerous precisely because it carried knowledge, credibility, and influence. These murders included Professors, doctors, heads of departments, and their family members, including their children.
The parallel is stark. When political leaders and disinformation merchants scapegoat scientists, they don’t just weaken research; they mark researchers as enemies of the state or of “the people.” In Germany, that branding ended in firing squads. In the United States today, it has already ended in gunfire at the CDC. The lesson is clear: silencing scientists doesn’t always begin with banning grants or deleting datasets. Sometimes it starts with a speech, a rumor, or a conspiracy theory, until one armed believer decides that killing the messenger will erase the message.
The violence in Atlanta did not happen in a vacuum. Across the health agencies, the ground has shifted under the people we ask to keep us safe.
Additionally, the U.S. government is stripping thousands of federal health workers of collective-bargaining rights, weakening the very protections employees rely on when they’re reassigned, targeted, or pressured to stay quiet. Unions call it illegal; the department calls it focus. Either way, the message is unmistakable: we will have less shelter if we speak up.[20]
Then there are the jobs. In the immediate wake of the shooting, hundreds of CDC employees received final termination notices, a wave of layoffs that hollowed out programs just as staff were pleading for protection. Internal counts put the number at about 600, while HHS employees publicly warned that leadership’s rhetoric was making them targets.
As a side note, in recent months, nearly 4,000 NASA employees, over 20% of the agency’s workforce, have left under the administration’s so-called “Deferred Resignation Program,” shrinking the agency’s capacity just as climate and Earth-observation missions are being shuttered. Additionally, twenty-three staff members were directly terminated, and critical departments, such as the Office of the Chief Scientist and the DEIA branch, were shut down. These weren’t budgetary streamlines; they were deliberate moves to hollow out scientific capability. At other research agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Institute of Education Sciences, the pattern repeats: grants are canceled, studies are halted, expert staff are purged or reassigned, and entire programs are dismantled. For those who remain, the checkpoint is clear: stay quiet or risk irrelevance, displacement, or worse.
Harassment is being industrialized, too. A “DEI Watch List” site has posted the names, photos, and job titles of federal workers, many of whom work in health equity, thereby targeting civil servants and sparking a surge of threats. Employees describe it as intimidation by design; newsrooms traced it to a conservative nonprofit with links across the movement.[21]
Academia is feeling the same chill. When the federal government politicizes grants, terminates awards en masse, or labels topics “high-risk,” university labs absorb the signal: avoid certain words, avoid specific questions, avoid certain fields, or watch our funding disappear. Major outlets and scholarly surveys report widespread self-censorship as researchers steer away from terms like “equity,” “climate change,” or even “gender” to survive review. The result isn’t just fewer papers; it’s less truth in public.[22]
This is not a series of accidents. Put it together and we see a system that is weakening worker protection, slashing positions, publishing watchlists, and flooding the information space with conspiracy and doubt. Some scientists remain quiet to stay safe, while others leave. And some, like those at the CDC, face a danger that begins online and ends at the office door. If we want the people who track outbreaks, run labs, and teach the next generation to keep doing that work, we have to make it safe, on payroll, in policy, and in public. Otherwise, the loudest voices won’t be the ones with the data. They’ll be the ones with the bullhorns.
We need those people who track pandemics, probe our atmosphere, understand ecosystems, and teach the next generation to continue doing that work. In that case, we must make it safe, not just politically, but institutionally and personally. Otherwise, the loudest voices won’t come from those with the data. They’ll belong to whoever holds the microphone, and no doubt that’s a danger more profound than any single act of censorship.
So, before I conclude, I want to scatter several historical red flags that serve as imminent warnings.
Red Flag Number 1:
In the early 1600s, Galileo’s observations challenged the authority of the church. But the church did not out-calculate him. Instead, the church confined him and declared the matter settled. They shuttered the theory of heliocentrism, much like the United States government is deleting the data set so that we never have to consider what the evidence shows. Currently, in the United States, science isn’t being debated so much as managed, muzzled, and manipulated. Climate satellites are being slated for cancellation, federal portals are going dark, and research grants are being screened and edited for political comfort. The tactic is the same across centuries: if governments control the evidence, governments control the truth; and by blinding the public, power protects itself at the expense of progress.
Red Flag Number 2:
University speech codes dressed up as “balance,” lists of suspect scholars, and loyalty tests for curricula echo a darker precedent. And this is not new. In Nazi Germany, “undesirable science” was purged, Jewish scholars expelled, and educators were murdered. These actions drained Germany of brilliance, which in turn remade the world’s laboratories without Germany at their center. Taking a page out of the playbooks of Roman Emperor Justinian in the fifth century and Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, the current restrictive policies and orders threaten universities, academia and scientists with funding freezes unless they bend to ideology and capitulate to his demands, as a result, like in Athens and in Nazi Germany, the United States will risk a similar version of the same mistake. Our current administration is unsettling the scientific community, driving talent away, and leaving discovery, prestige, and the industry it fosters to other nations.
Red Flag Number 3:
Political meddling in research proposals, black-listed words in grants, and “high-risk” topics that must be renamed to survive review are not administrative quirks; they are a method. And this is not new. Stalin needed a yes man, and he found that in Trofim Lysenko and his theories of Lysenkosim. In 1948, the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Services, with Stalin’s full backing, officially declared Mendelian genetics and molecular biology to be “bourgeois pseudoscience.” As a result, textbooks were rewritten, courses in genetics were shut down, and universities were purged of biology departments. Stalin’s regime forced the education of Lysenkoism and replaced genetics with politically convenient fictions. These theories sabotaged crops and led to widespread famine, starving seven million people. So, whenever policy dictates conclusions, reality exacts a price and ultimately cuts funding. To equate this, let’s look at weather forecasting. The administration’s efforts to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration won’t keep the storms from coming. It will only make the models worse and the desperately needed responses much too late.
Red Flag Number 4:
Scientists and teachers branded as enemies by talk-show rhetoric and partisan feeds face a rising tide of threats. And this is not new. During China’s Cultural Revolution, headed by Mao Zedong in 1966, scientists and other intellectuals were targeted, humiliated, imprisoned, and persecuted. Mao Zedong ordered the destruction of historical texts, intent on destroying what he referred to as the “Four Olds,” which were old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. This frighteningly mirrors Trump’s recent request, just a few weeks before the release of this podcast, to implement oversight into our history through the defunding and restructuring of the United States museums, including the Smithsonian. On social media, Trump noted that these museums are “the last remaining segment of WOKE.” Adding that he will “start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities.”[23]
So, like China, the United States is facing decades of progress that will vanish with the people who could have brought us enlightenment. When public health workers need security details, when faculty weigh personal safety against publishing, we are flirting with the same rule: punish knowledge to prove power. Every time science was shackled, society paid the price in famine, war, or stagnation. If the red flags of danger continue to serve as a valid warning, this will soon be our new future.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF IGNORING THE RED FLAGS OF DANGER:
So what happens when we ignore the red flags of danger? What happens when science is silenced? The past answers plainly: Galileo’s suppression slowed astronomy; Nazi purges fractured Europe’s scientific leadership; Stalin’s pseudoscience caused famine; Mao’s persecutions erased a generation of expertise. The present is writing its own ledger: delayed climate action, weakened early-warning systems, stalled medical research, and an erosion of public trust that outlives any one administration. If the United States, still a nerve center for global research, lets its scientific engine seize, the shock waves do not stop at our borders. Vaccines are developed more slowly, carbon targets slip out of reach, disaster planning fails, and the world recalibrates around new hubs of discovery. We have seen this movie before. It never ends well, and it ends worse for those who arrive late to the truth. If you are on the outside looking in on what is happening in the United States, please note that we are not simply debating policy differences; current policiesare literally developing scorched-earth campaigns against knowledge itself.
History doesn’t forgive societies that burn their libraries, exile their scientists, or starve their universities. It remembers them for the disasters that followed. Every case we’ve walked through, Galileo gagged, scholars purged in Germany, genetics outlawed in the Soviet Union, classrooms silenced in China, starts with the same decision: let power rewrite the evidence. The price is always paid later, by people who never voted for ignorance but had to live with it.
Our country is standing on the edge of repeating those mistakes. Not with bonfires in the town square, but with subtler tools: defunding labs, canceling satellites, closing data portals, and putting politics where peer review should be. The oligarchy doesn’t have to erase the telescope if it can unplug it. The system doesn’t have to arrest the scientist if it can make the grant disappear. And if a ruling body convinces the public that expertise is arrogance and evidence is “just one opinion,” then silencing becomes self-service. People will soon stop listening even before censorship starts.
Here’s the hard truth: if we allow this to continue, the losses won’t be contained within campus walls or agency hallways. They’ll show up at the hospital during heat waves, in crop failures and insurance premiums, in missed cancer trials and muddled curricula. What looks like a culture war is actually a capacity crisis. And capacity is the difference between a society that can anticipate a storm and one that only digs out afterward.
So ask yourself: when your kids need an antibiotic that hasn’t been discovered yet, do you want the lab that would have found it to be closed? When your town’s flood maps need to be updated, do you want the data archived or deleted? When the next outbreak comes, do you want scientists stepping up to the microphone or stepping back because the last one who spoke got doxxed? We are not spectators; we’re authors. The next chapter is ours to write.
We’re on the brink. The question isn’t whether the stakes are high; it’s whether we will fight back, calmly, lawfully, relentlessly, for the simple principle that truth should be measured, not managed.
So, what can you do? How can you get involved? Even if you are reading to this outside of the United States, please support science and defend research. Push back against ignorance, because if science falls, we all fall. And here’s precisely where you can start, today:
PROTECT SCIENTISTS AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Internationally
United States
Union of Concerned Scientists (U.S.) – a watchdog on scientific integrity; report interference, support protections
Professional societies (join, fund advocacy, back ethics and integrity offices):
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Geophysical Union
American Mathematical Society
American Psychological Association
DEFEND RESEARCH AND DATA
Preserve Vulnerable Climate And Health Datasets
Additionally, consider donating to unrestricted research funds at local universities and medical centers, which help keep labs running when grants are frozen.
STRENGTHEN PUBLIC HEALTH
U.S. CITIZEN: CIVIC POWER WHERE YOU LIVE
- Attend school board and city council meetings when curricula or climate plans are on the agenda.
- Back campaign-finance reformsand disclosure lawsthat reduce dark-money pressure on evidence-based policy.
- Subscribe to and share local science journalism; write op-eds when datasets vanish.
- Join citizen-scienceprojects, such as iNaturalist, eBird, Zooniverse, and Foldit, and bring kids, neighbors, and classrooms with you.
INTERNATIONALLY: CIVIC POWER WHERE YOU LIVE The fight for facts is borderless, and so is the payoff.
- Fund open-science platforms
- Support at-risk scholars
- Volunteer in citizen science
- Press your own governments to safeguard scientific integrity and research budgets.
The fight for facts is borderless, and so is the payoff.
We don’t need permission to defend reality. We need habits. Pick one action tonight, send a note to your representative, donate to a data archive, sign up for a citizen-science project, and then pick another tomorrow. History’s verdict is already written for those who silence science. Let ours be different: a generation that stood up for the people who measure the world, so the rest of us could survive it and make it better.
[1] Kassam, Ashifa. 2025. “‘The American System Is Being Destroyed’: Academics on Leaving US for ‘Scientific Asylum’ in France.” Education. The Guardian, July 5. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/05/academics-leaving-us-scientific-asylum-france-trump.
[2] Casey, Michael. 2025. “Trump Administration Freezes $2.2 Billion in Grants to Harvard over Campus Activism.” AP News, April 14. https://apnews.com/article/harvard-trump-administration-federal-cuts-antisemitism-0a1fb70a2c1055bda7c4c5a5c476e18d.
[3] Bhuiyan, Johana, and staff. 2025. “Harvard Sues Trump Administration over Efforts to ‘Gain Control of Academic Decision-Making.’” Education. The Guardian, April 22. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/apr/21/harvard-sues-trump-administration.
[4] Powell, Alvin. 2025. “Harvard Won’t Comply with Trump Administration’s Demands.” Harvard Gazette, April 15. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/04/harvard-wont-comply-with-demands-from-trump-administration/.
[5] Vasquez, Krystal. 2025. “8 Agencies to Terminate $450 Million in Grants to Harvard.” Chemical & Engineering News, January 21. https://cen.acs.org/policy/research-funding/8‑agencies-terminate-450-million/103/web/2025/05.
[6] Patel, Droov, and Grace Yoon. 2025. “HHS Freezes $60 Million in Federal Grants to Harvard in Third Round of Trump Cuts | News | The Harvard Crimson.” May 20. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/20/hhs-60-million-cut/.
[7] Gracie, Carrie. 2012. “Qin Shi Huang: The Ruthless Emperor Who Burned Books.” Magazine. BBC News, October 12. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19922863.
[8] Birchak, Gabrielle. 2024. Hypatia: The Sum of Her Life. Birkman Press, 125.
[9] The White House. 2025. “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K‑12 Schooling.” The White House, January 29. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/.
[10] Meckler, Laura, and Justine McDaniel. 2025. “Education Department Quietly Removes Rules for Teaching English Learners.” The Washington Post, August 20. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/08/20/education-department-english-learner-rules/.
[11] Holocaust Encyclopedia. n.d. “Indoctrinating Youth.” Accessed August 31, 2025. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/indoctrinating-youth.
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[13] The White House. 2025. “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Reforms Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education.” The White House, April 23. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-reforms-accreditation-to-strengthen-higher-education/.
[14] The White House. 2025. “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Reforms Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education.” The White House, April 23. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-reforms-accreditation-to-strengthen-higher-education/.
[15] Borinskaya, Svetlana A., Andrei I. Ermolaev, and Eduard I. Kolchinsky. 2019. “Lysenkoism Against Genetics: The Meeting of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences of August 1948, Its Background, Causes, and Aftermath.” Genetics 212 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.118.301413.
[16] “[Rollback] Trump Signed Executive Order Directing Agencies to Revoke and Revise Agencies’ Scientific Integrity Policies – Environmental and Energy Law Program.” n.d. Accessed August 31, 2025. https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/tracker/epa-updated-scientific-integrity-policyagency-strategy/.
[17] Cartier, Kimberly M. S. 2025. “NASA Planning for Unauthorized Shutdown of Carbon Monitoring Satellites.” Eos, August 5. https://eos.org/research-and-developments/nasa-planning-for-unauthorized-shutdown-of-carbon-monitoring-satellites.
[18] Yoder, Kate. 2025. “Inside the Federal Government’s Purge of Climate Data.” Vox, July 21. https://www.vox.com/climate/420289/national-climate-assesment-trump-administration-climate-science-data-purge.
[19] Lee, Chantelle. n.d. “Public Health Workers Criticize RFK Jr. After CDC Shooting.” Accessed September 1, 2025. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/public-health-workers-criticize-rfk-jr-after-cdc-shooting/ar-AA1KUdns?ocid=BingNewsSerp.
[20] Stobbe, Mike. 2025. “HHS Moves to Strip Thousands of Federal Health Workers of Union Rights.” AP News, August 22. https://apnews.com/article/hhs-cdc-unions-96ac80031b9c4da4d5f68e3c7fc8d156.
[21] Hellmann, Melissa. 2025. “‘Really Scary’: Rightwing Watchlist Found of Mostly Black Federal Health Workers.” US News. The Guardian, February 6. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/black-health-federal-workers-watchlist.
[22] Hellmann, Melissa. 2025. “‘Really Scary’: Rightwing Watchlist Found of Mostly Black Federal Health Workers.” US News. The Guardian, February 6. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/black-health-federal-workers-watchlist.
[23] CBC. 2025. “Trump Threatens Smithsonian Museums in Escalating Attacks on Social Media.” CBC News, August 19. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-attacks-smithsonian‑1.7613175.