Gabe Kaminsky: How Elon Musk Unleashed Chaos in the NIH

This stuff concerns me a lot--and, presumably, concerns a lot of people with my general kind of position.

   Cutting purchases of liquid nitrogen for cancer research: very, very bad. But, note: quickly and rightly reversed.

   As for "sex education for transgender youth:" cut it. Cut it all. This will obviously be largely an initiative to advance progressive-left dogmas about sex and transgenderism. Trangenderism is pseudoscience. So this is rather like studying sex education among UFO abductees or people with multiple personalities or repressed memories, or victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse. If you're going to study anything at all about transgenderism, study how this pseudoscientific, ideological bit of mass sociogenic illness can be combatted.

   And, as for worthy projects with DEI in their proposals: the main problem here is that organizations like NIH forced DEI to be injected into proposals in order for funding to be granted. And almost none of the researchers pushed back. Now they're paying a price. These will have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. If the researchers are willing to affirm that it was just boilerplate, that it can be expunged without undermining the project, and that they did it just because they had to, then I say restore the funding. Generally, however, projects that do actually have DEI as an essential component should be defunded.

   In addition to cutting waste, we're combatting ideological capture. The main damage has already been done by Democrats. Trump et al. are trying to fix it. This isn't easy, and there will be mistakes. Emphasizing those mistakes without the relevant context distorts the situation.

   Look, if some health researcher wants to study, say, "structural racism," let him submit his proposal. Most of that stuff is bullshit and should be rejected. But not necessarily out of hand. DEI is a characteristically leftist idea, however, in that it isn't just offered up as an ordinary idea alongside other ideas. Rather, it is injected into everything. It's treated as a kind of axiom that must be injected into all research, regardless of what it's on. This is one of the main reasons such leftist nonsense is so dangerous. Even when people start coming to their senses, it's very difficult to disentangle and extract it. Also, of course, it's not a matter of a few stupid research projects--it's now a pervasive dogma that Democrats forced into everything--this stuff about NIH barely scratches the surface. Democrats refused to fund any projects that didn't include some reference to this dogma. Now, TFP and similar pubs did criticize this--but the MSM didn't. They ignored or defended the madness. Now they're doing everything in their power to emphasize the difficulties and downsides of undoing this particular bit of progressive Lysenkoism.

   Nevertheless: there is reason to be concerned about how the administration is going about this.

   Also nevertheless, however: they tried gentler, more ordinary methods last time, and were thwarted by the very institutions and organizations they were trying to fix.

   This time around, they've decided that they can either rip off the band-aid...or let this lunatic ideology fester in them and, eventually, destroy them.