Senate Confirms RFKj
I'm not wild about this.
But what do I know?
Imagine a hand palming a human face forever
I thought the academic DEI juggernaut was unstoppable. Then, a week after President Trump’s inauguration, I got an email with an announcement from the Department of Energy: “The Office of Science is immediately ending the requirement for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plans in any proposal submitted. . . . Reviewers will not be asked to read or comment on PIER Plans. Selection decisions will not take into consideration the content of PIER Plans or any reviewer comments on PIER Plans.”
PIER plans, which the Biden administration instituted in 2022, required every grant application to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” In the words of the announcement, “The complexity and detail of a PIER Plan is expected to increase with the size of the research team and the number of personnel to be supported.”
The end of the PIER Plan and other DEI-related requirements is seismic. The major source of physical science research support in the country has sent a message to universities: Stick to science. It may be the death knell of what appeared to be an invulnerable academic bureaucracy that has been impeding the progress of higher education and research for at least a decade.
The massive, expensive and overwhelming DEI infrastructure at universities is motivated in large part by the need to respond to and comply with regulations associated with federal support of research and education. The DOE’s Office of Science is the single biggest funder of physical sciences in the U.S. It provides support for university programs and oversees the 10 U.S. National Laboratories, which provide facilities used by university faculty across many disciplines.
Last year a colleague of mine and I used ChatGPT to examine all 12,065 awards made by the National Science Foundation and classified more than 1,000 of them, accounting for more than $675 million, as focused on DEI rather than science. And under Biden decrees, even science-focused grants were evaluated on DEI grounds.
1. I wonder, ad hominem, whether Dr. Levitsky raised such objections against the leftist soft totalitarian madness that's reigned in country for the last decade?
2. Seems like an overreaction, but it's important. Needless to say, we can't allow Trump to exercise autocratic power. The mere fact that the left is worse/crazier shouldn't deter us from objecting to any Trumpian overreach. Of course, most of us aren't too clear on what counts as overreach here... So that's a complication.
Or: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day atrocities committed by the Trump administration. Every hour brings a new crisis, every day something precious or useful gets smashed. That’s on purpose. The torrent of Trump lawlessness is designed to keep us forever focused on what’s happening right now, constantly defending ourselves against the latest unhinged pronouncement.
I would have fallen deep into this myopic trap these past two weeks, but there has been one thing keeping me focused on the long horizon: my children. I have two boys, ages 12 and 9. Every day I look at them, I am forced to contemplate the future—to worry about the future Trump is stealing from them, and the terrible suffering that awaits them in the world Trump seeks to create.
Like any parent worthy of the title, I don’t give a damn about what happens to me. I’ve had my chances. Born in 1978, I had the opportunity to grow up during a brief window where this country seemed genuinely interested in becoming the multi-racial, multi-ethnic democratic polity that it always promised to be but never once achieved. I benefited from the heroic efforts of my parents and ancestors.
...
For inspiration, I’ve looked to a fictional parent who knows what it’s like to be raising a child on the cusp of the apocalypse: the heroine of the Terminator movies, Sarah Connor. For people unfamiliar with this 40-year-old movie, allow me to regale you with a brief synopsis. On August 29, 1997 “Skynet,” a military artificial intelligence, became self-aware and unleashed a nuclear holocaust. It created a race of sentient robots, Terminators, to crush the remaining human opposition. In 2029, one such Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back to 1984 Los Angeles to kill Sarah Connor, who is the mother of the future human resistance leader, John Connor. Future John Connor is able to send one soldier back in time to protect his mother.
When we meet Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton) in 1984, she is weak. She’s a classic Hollywood “damsel in distress” updated for the 1980s with big hair and spunkiness. She spends most of the first movie running and hiding, and nearly ensures her doom by calling her mother. She and the soldier bang, and the soldier sacrifices himself to try to destroy the Terminator. He fails to kill it, but Sarah is able to lure the robot into a hydraulic press and… terminate it. The movie ends with her visibly pregnant with the soldier’s baby, who will become John Connor, and is leaving audio tapes for him about what the world was like before the tragedy she now knows is coming. Little does she know that Schwarzenegger will be back, more or less as a good guy.
Fast forward to Terminator 2: John Connor is now 10-years-old, but he’s living with foster parents because his mother has been sent to a prison psychiatric institution because she has (entirely reasonably) become a bit of a terrorist trying to stop the people building Skynet from bringing about the end of the world. When we first see Sarah Connor in T2 she is ripped. She’s changed her physique from Olivia Newton John to something approaching Rambo. She is hardened. She can kill. When she breaks out of prison, we find out that she’s been stashing guns and ammo all throughout the Southwest, and has been training her son in military strategy and computer hacking. She has transformed herself, body and soul, from a victim of forces beyond her control, into John-the-Baptist of badasses.
I believe that every liberal parent is now in the position of Sarah Connor after the first Terminator movie. We can see the future awaiting our children, and it is bleak. Our mission, our only mission, is to prepare our kids for what is coming, and maybe see if there’s anything we can do to stop Trump’s future from happening. We’re going to need to teach our children skills that we never had, to face a future different from anything we ourselves experienced. We’re going to need to get in shape and learn how to fight for them in ways that disregard what others may think of our methods.
I...I can't...I can't even........WTFF????
I'm so freaking outraged right now that I'd better stick with: big if true.
The agency in the Biden years supported electric vehicles in Vietnam and a “transgender clinic” in India. A Serbian LGBTQ group called ‘Grupa Izadji,’ received $1.5 million to ‘advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.” There are many other examples.