The comedians are going to be busy.

He really is a sad little man. He did a White House interview with ABC, and you’ll never guess how it ends…with Trump giving a tour of the collection of photos he has had mounted on the wall that ‘prove’ he had the biggest inauguration crowds ever. The interviewer smiled and failed to mention that the data show he is wrong, that he persists in insisting on this lie after being shown the evidence that his claim was false makes him a liar, and that his obsession in denying his unpopularity as president makes him petty and unfit for office.

But then, the interviewer probably hopes to get invited back, so he was avoiding asking those pointed questions that might annoy the buffoon-in-chief.

A little history lesson: the United States has not always been a major player in scientific research. In fact, Europe has a longer research tradition, and before WWII the US was looked upon as a bucolic place that had the advantages of a great deal of natural resources, but with only scattered centers of academic excellence, and most of the research was done by the independently wealthy at private colleges. I remember reading about Edwin Conklin, a big name developmental biologist at the turn of the last century, and being rather surprised that all of his work at marine stations was paid for out of his own pocket, a fact of life that was taken entirely for granted at the time.

All the big state colleges that are the backbone of our research efforts now were founded as either agricultural schools or normal, or teaching, schools. They were not intended to be major research centers. You’d go to State U to learn how to farm, or in a few place, mine, or how to become a public school teacher. In my grandparents’ day, that was the default: you’d scrimp and save to send the oldest son to college to prepare him to inherit the family farm, and maybe you’d send the oldest daughter off to learn to be the local school marm.

That all changed with WWII and the work of Vannevar Bush, who saw an opportunity to harness the potential brain power of the country. You don’t think Europe hoped for our entry into the war because we’d bring in high tech wonder weapons, do you? We were a big reserve of manpower for cannon fodder and iron for ships and artillery. The Brits (and the Germans) were the eggheads. Bush was the man who transformed everything in this country, providing resources through the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development to fund innovative science and cultivate an atmosphere that valued research at our universities. Everything that we appreciate about American science flowed out of the investment of federal funds in the research enterprise via the OSRD, which eventually metamorphosed into the National Science Foundation, the major source of basic research funding. (The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is also huge, but as you might guess from the name has more of an applied research focus on biomedical research, although plenty of basic research also gets smuggled in).

A chill should run down your spine when Trump’s pick for the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, suggests that … what might be the best question: do we really need government funded research at all. The context of that question was a rambling post in which he raised a whole lot of, to his mind, unanswered questions about the Zika virus.

Brazil’s microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery — if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? According to a new report from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in Colombia and elsewhere raises serious questions about the assumed connection between Zika and microcephaly.

He was wrong about just about everything, as the linked article explains, but still what strikes me is that he’s pointing out all these difficulties, and raising all these questions (see those question marks? Scientists are the people who bring up those question marks and then try to answer them), and he’s then using the questions as a reason to avoid funding the process of resolving them. This is a man who doesn’t understand the whole point of research, to the point that he considers the possibility of not funding it at all. He’d like to roll back American science to the 1920s.

I can tell you personally what that would be like: you’d reduce American science to places like my lab. I’ve worked at Research 1 universities, and this is a whole ‘nother animal. I have no federal funding — a few of my colleagues do get small NSF grants now and then, but it’s hard to persuade the agencies to support small schools, especially when grant money is incredibly tight. I have a tiny lab space that also does double-duty as a class lab when I teach small upper level courses (many of my colleagues across the country will be jealous: they have no lab of their own, but do have classroom space that can do double-duty as a research lab when they aren’t teaching). I keep up with small supplies — pipettes, paper towels, that sort of thing — with maintenance money from the department.

My chief research tool, a microscope, was purchased with a state grant, part of the building fund that paid for renovations of the old science building and construction of a new wing. It isn’t really my scope; it’s a shared resource for all of the biology faculty that just happens to be kept in my lab.

I’ve been lucky in that I do have an independent, but small, revenue stream. All the additional equipment in my lab, like my digital camera system and animal maintenance stuff, is paid for with…blogging money! Yes, real student research is being supported by those obnoxious ads you see springing up around here. Now try to imagine a world-class biology research unit (not mine) with dozens of grad students and a gang of post-docs and a couple of technicians and the latest, cutting edge research tools that burn through reagents that cost more than my annual salary trying to support themselves by creating a popular blog and sprinkling it with ads for the latest fad food that will help you lose weight.

That isn’t going to happen.

The kinds of research I can do are limited. The latest project is one that Edwin Conklin would have understood perfectly in 1905, using tools that would have been considered high-tech in 1978, but I think we’ll be able to eke out a little bit of useful data, a tiny contribution to the body of evidence. My main contribution is that I can teach students to think like scientists, even with our limited resources, so they can go off to research careers at bigger places…which would cease to exist if Mick Mulvaney had his way.

I am not complaining about my situation. This is actually what I wanted, a place where I could focus on teaching, didn’t have to spend all my time writing hard-to-get grants, and could still work independently in a small lab. It’s perfect for me. It is not at all ideal if you want a national source of advanced research. You’re just going to have a lot of people like me training eager, ambitious kids for possibilities that you’ve eliminated.

That’s not the worst of it.

Suddenly, the federal government has decreed that USDA scientists may not talk about their work in public. This is antithetical to the whole point of doing science!

The EPA has frozen all of its grants. Environmental scientists have also been told they can’t communicate with the public.

The CDC has pre-emptively canceled a climate change meeting. Why? I suspect they’re battening down the hatches, preparing for some lean years, and investing in a meeting that will just get canceled by the administration is an unwise choice.

The National Park Service is being censored. Badlands National Park has had tweets deleted that discussed the evidence for climate change. “Rogue” elements of the park service have resorted to disseminating information under aliases.

All this in just the first four days of the Trump regime taking office. It takes far less time to demolish an institution than it does to build one up. Vannevar Bush’s contributions took decades to bear fruit, and Trump is determined to burn them all down in days.

And taking a wrecking crew to science isn’t even the worst thing he has done! He aims to wreck public education with the appointment of Betsy DeVos — even my small lab becomes pointless if that stream of eager, ambitious students dries up. Congress is busily trying to prohibit all family planning. How’s this for irony?

Making it (Hyde) permanent is not just important for the moral fiber — fabric of our country, but you’ll see millions more lives saved by us taking this important action, House GOP Whip Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, told reporters Tuesday.

I remember Henry Hyde, corrupt Catholic, philanderer and adulterer. That his name is invoked at the same time as the words “moral fiber” is amazing hypocrisy.

So, in this time of turmoil, when injustice rules and inequity thrives, when all is to be subordinated to the selfish greed of a small number of extremely wealthy white people, I fear that the loss of American science is a tiny problem and will be lost in the chaos. It is shaping up to be an early casualty, though, and when faced with a thousand losses, triage is hard, and terrifying. We are looking at devastating losses to humanity on all fronts, thanks to the fact that we have elected an incompetent demagogue to lead the country, who is propped up by a political party that has become a garbage fire of epic proportions.

We’re doomed.

But we need to keep fighting for everything, every step of the way. A Scientist’s March on Washington is being organized. I don’t think it can have the impact of the Women’s March — we don’t have the numbers — but maybe if it’s a march intended to focus on one-on-one lobbying with congress, and to getting the press engaged, it can help.

Ultimately, though, the only thing that’s going to make a big difference is to depose the tyrant and banish him to a cozy retirement home where he can watch a lot of TV and do no further harm. We also have to basically delete the entire Republican party and grow a new, rational opposition party, one that will give the Democrats an incentive to actually do effective good for a change.

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More on the Scientist’s March on Washington — it’s very preliminary, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

You should know this word, it’ll be useful in years to come.

claque |klak|
noun
1 a group of sycophantic followers: the president was surrounded by a claque of scheming bureaucrats.
2 a group of people hired to applaud (or heckle) a performer or public speaker.
ORIGIN
mid 19th century: French, from claquer ‘to clap.’ The practice of paying members of an audience for their support originated at the Paris opera.

Note that this is different from clique, which is “a small group of people, with shared interests or other features in common, who spend time together and do not readily allow others to join them.” While it is mildly pejorative, we all have our little cliques; very few of us are dishonest enough to pay for a claque.

It all ends tomorrow, so I hope you’ve got plans. I’m spending it teaching — we’ve got to have people prepared to restore the lost promise. Tomorrow the TV stays off, radio (who listens to radio anymore?) is disabled, I’m boycotting all of the news, and I’m going to focus on biology prep work for the next week.

Saturday we begin the long hard slog of trying to crawl out of the slime pit we’ve dug for ourselves. And I get to spend the rest of my life ashamed to have been an American.

We are not a nation of laws, if we ever were. We are a rogue state, a banana republic, and we always have been…we’ve been held together with a tissue of cherished myths about Democracy and the Republic and Service and Citizenship, when the truth is that those values are unenforced, and the real rule is that the rich can get away with anything they want.

We’ve also been watching the gradual replacement of “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” with the Libertarian myth of “I got mine, so fuck you.” I can’t even console myself with the old gloss of American idealism anymore when naked capitalism has become the raison d’etre of the state.

So how about them senate hearings on the Trump adminstration, hey? Perfect examples of the failures of our government. We sort of lied to ourselves and said before that maybe the electoral college would save us, that it’s whole purpose was to prevent unqualified demagogues from taking power. We sure fooled ourselves with that one — the purpose of the electoral college is to perpetuate the power of the obscenely wealthy and comfortable elites. And now we have a series of hearings on Trump nominees, all carried out in the vain illusion that they will act to block incompetents and corrupt cronies of the head of state from getting their hands on the tools of state. Do you believe it?

Jeff Sessions is a racist buffoon. The senate will judge him next week. I predict that he will be approved, not because he actually reassured us all that he is a good man, but because the rubber stamp is poised and ready.

Right now we get the spectacle of Betsy DeVos being alternatively praised/massaged by Republican ideologues, and subjected to critical questioning by the powerless minority party.

DeVos is a bigot who profited off the Amway pyramid scheme.

Both the DeVoses and the Princes have been key supporters of Focus on the Family, which was founded by the influential evangelical leader James Dobson. In a 2002 radio broadcast, Dobson called on parents in some states to to pull their kids out of public schools, calling the curriculum “godless and immoral” and suggesting that Christian teachers should also leave public schools: “I couldn’t be in an organization that’s supporting that kind of anti-Christian nonsense.” Dobson also has distributed a set of history lessons that argue that “separating Christianity from government is virtually impossible and would result in unthinkable damage to the nation and its people.” The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation gave $275,000 to Focus on the Family from 1999 to 2001 but hasn’t donated since; it gave an additional $35,760 to the group’s Michigan and DC affiliates from 2001 to 2010. The Prince Foundation donated $5.2 million to Focus on the Family and $275,000 to its Michigan affiliate from 2001 to 2014. (It also gave $6.1 million to the Family Research Council, which has fought against same-sex marriage and anti-bullying programs—and is listed as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The FRC used to be a division of Focus on the Family before it became an independent nonprofit, with Dobson serving on its board, in 1992.)

She will demolish public education to promote racial inequities.

Yet, for all of the Obama administration’s education policy failures, the DeVos appointment has the potential to be catastrophic. It represents a clear and present danger to the wellbeing of scores of students of color who have been most heavily impacted by privatization and the gutting of multicultural education. Nationwide, African-American, Latino, and Native-American students continue to have the lowest graduation and college-going rates. They are less likely to be taught by well-qualified teachers and more likely to be in schools where college counselors are either absent or saddled with too many students. Indeed, some urban schools of color have more school police than college counselors. And because many students of color don’t have equitable access to college prep curricula in the humanities and STEM disciplines, they have higher attrition rates when they go to college.

She is criminally incompetent and unsuited to the post.

As nearly as I can tell, the nominees for the president-elect’s Cabinet fall into several different categories. There are the people you’d pretty much expect from any Republican administration. (James Mattis, Stephen Flynn, Ryan Zinke). There are the people who understand the mission of their departments and have spent their lives undermining it. (Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Rick Perry at Energy, Andrew Puzder at Labor). And there are the people who are fundamentally clueless about the general nature of public service. (Rex Tillerson at State.) On Tuesday night, DeVos demonstrated that she is that rarest of Trump administration fauna: Someone who fits capably into all three categories.

She and her family and the Amway gozillions they control have been a bottomless reservoir for the dark money that is the engine behind a dozen different conservative fetish objects, from right-to-work laws, to gutting campaign finance regulations, to injecting splinter Protestantism into every part of the political commons. So she’s pretty much what you’d expect from any Republican administration. She understands the mission of the Department of Education and truly dislikes it. And, as was graphically demonstrated even in the truncated questioning Tuesday night, she doesn’t know enough about education policy to feed to your guppies.

Do any of you believe for one minute that her nomination will be stopped by anyone in our government? Not I. She has demonstrated her talent for kleptocracy in Michigan already, she is an ill-gained billionaire, she intends to promote ignorance, and she has all the petty bigotries of the capitalist ruling class, so of course she will sail through and get a choice spot in which to loot the educational system and be a cheerleader for theocracy.

All that stuff about separation of church and state and an informed citizenry and responsible representative government from the founding fathers (who are deified by the Republican party) was a smokescreen to cover a wealthy power grab. I can’t believe it any more. Many thanks to the Republicans and Trump for at least stripping the pretense and exposing the naked truth.

I fear my own views on the American government. When a nation works so hard to lose all the confidence of its people, upheaval is not far off.

That has to count for something, right?