It's often helpful when writing a story, a book, an article, or the account of an era, to clarify the principal and the subsidiary elements. They are not always obvious. In our moment, overwhelmed as we are by unrelenting onslaughts of injury and shock, I've tried to undertake this clarification-simplification exercise.
As I see it, the the drumpf “agenda” or at least the principal driving components, some initiated by him and his lifelong malignant narcissism, and others by savvier actors treating him as a useful idiot, have the five central elements:
Racism (See Central Park Five ad, 1989, “birtherism,” and Obama's roast of Dump at the 2011 Correspondents’ Dinner)
Putin and Russia (cf. the Helsinki summit in 2018)
Techbros, crypto, oligarchs, breaking things for their own extreme profit and power
Small government (Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, Reagan legacy), end of FDR redistributive model, end of limits to industry
Sexism, racism, antisemitism, white conservative Christian nationalism, end of "political correctness,” DEI, wokeness, etc. (also Project 2025)
Each of these has many components, some apparently unrelated. In order to accomplish any of them, certain foundations have to be in place.
In this context, all the anti-education, anti-expert, anti-science, and anti-knowledge efforts are means to these ends.
So while they may not be the central goal, still it is necessary to stand up for all of them.
On Friday all around the United States people were “standing up for science,” in an effort to challenge the systematic dismantling of NSF, NIH, cutting of “indirect costs,” CDC, WHO membership, and more. Medicine and basic science are being attacked, exemplified by the Health and Human Services Director choice of Robert F Kennedy, Jr., and his anti-vaccination stance. Dump doesn't care about any of this, of course, but he loves the chaos. We will have measles outbreaks, bird flu, food poisoning, and many other preventable effects, just as drumpf resisted the scientific insights of his Covid advisors like Dr. Anthony Fauci in the initial moments of the pandemic in 2020.
In my small context of South Bend and Notre Dame, on Friday we had our own little protest, organized by the joint medical school, Indiana University and Notre Dame. I recognized participants from Notre Dame, Indiana University South Bend, St. Mary's College. A person I knew only from social media drove up from Purdue, which was not having its own event. People had prepared very short statements. There were printed signs and tables where we could write our own. Someone provided pizza. As we stood on a relatively major street, people honked their support as they drove by.
It is one of many ways people are finding our collective voice.
The following day, International Women's Day, there was another protest.
As the weather improves, and as we find our feet, I'm hoping this will represent an “American Spring,” and that we can challenge even the distracting but consequential elements of this clear coup, building up to the truly central motivations.
We're standing up. We're walking. We're talking. We're gathering. We're calling. We're writing. We're not tired. We're just getting started.
