Darkness, Darkness ... Rev II

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Yours truly has waxed poetic about the 21st century version of the dark ages first foisted upon us by Trump I, aided and betted by Mitch, the supremes and the Heritage Foundation but you already know that, right? Now, fast forward to 2025 and ... from defrocking Harvard and other university elites to Robert F. Kennedy Jr's jihad against modern medicine and vaccines, the actions of this coterie of ignorant and demonic clowns continues ever onward in their endless pursuit of creating a christian/nazi/fascist entity designed to create a dictatorship over a once great nation known as America. Higher ed's not perfect with colleges colluding with the CC companies to gin tuition into the stratosphere along with maintaining deep connects to big business and the MIC but at the same time, basic research, funded by the government and enabled by the universities, have improved the quality of life in ways both astounding and profound but read on brave readers as The Atlantic's take regarding the new dark age circa 2025 is spot on and terrifying to contemplate without question.

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.

A Change is nigh ...