RFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals | Hacker News Reader

RFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals

theguardian.com

40 pointsbookofjoe24 comments

State run agencies, like DARPA, maybe, who not three weeks ago, RFK accused of being behind chemtrails?

> Kennedy responded. “That is not happening in my agency. We don’t do that. It’s done, we think, by DARPA,” he said, referring to the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. You know, those materials are put in jet fuel. I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.”

Enabled on a show by fucking Dr Phil.

It's not an original thought - but we are really, truly in a fucking idiocracy.

Apologies for my language, but how we ever got to this point...

Source: https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2025/what-is-darpa-str...

Trump is an idiot who surrounded himself with idiots in his administration. 30% of Americans are idiots who voted for Trump in 2024.

That list bit is the encouraging part - only 30% of American adults voted for Trump in 2024. The discouraging part is the majority of the remaining 70% couldn't be bothered to vote, which is idiotic in and of itself.

Dr Phil was riding dirty/sidesaddle/embedded with ICE in Chicago not too long after the inauguration

stupid is as stupid does.

Well this will make China and Europe real happy since this will speed up the US brain drain. Off to obscurity the US goes.

We will be like Ireland was in the 70s, people go to Univ. then leave Ireland for better pastures. Now people in the US will be begging to go to Ireland, I know a couple of Irish people who came to the US in the 80s, now they are back home.

Sometimes someone can be right for mostly wrong reasons. (Most of us will be familiar with the ideas of RFK jr.) Nonetheless, I do like the idea of federally funded journals. After all, the results being published are paid for by taxpayers, and it is unseemly to be placing them behind an expensive Elsevier paywall, so that they profit from publicly-funded science. And there certainly are arguments to be made that the private journals are corrupt, as a visit to retractionwatch.com will show.

I'm trying to "steel man" the points of view of someone who is a big Kennedy supporter and also a small government conservative. Is there any coherent world view where something like this is NOT condemned as excessive government interference? Can anyone help me here or is the only way to understand these events and their ardent supporters is through the lens of authoritarianism?

There is a difference between definitions of "small government". To some it means limited interference, to others it could just mean small in size - ie powerful laws free of bureaucrats or subtlety or oversight.

These views are usually opposed, but people who are not philosophically grounded might flit between them without realizing.

Ah, you mean some people actually want small as in "L'état, c'est moi!" - the smallest government there is?

Well, I can think of at least one person, unfortunately.

> There is a difference between definitions of "small government"

The traditional Republican definition of "small government" has been something like Norquist's: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Until Trump, I don't think there had been any Republican support for the "few people with a lot of authority and no oversight" definition. Now it seems pretty widespread, though.

This dude needs to be stopped ASAP

why?

I don't know if banning federal scientist from publishing has legal basis but creating a state run medical journal is not a bad idea in concept but we all know it will be used to push narratives that the state wants to push. Vaccines are bad, Trump coin cures cancer, unregulated substances from RFK's company will add years onto your life. You can always find 5 to 10 unscrupulous scientist or college professors who will trade ethics for dollars. Just call them leading scientist and have them publish whatever you want.

Right. RFK was literally on Dr Phil talking about how he is hiring someone whose "fulltime job" will be to investigate chemtrails, who RFK believes DARPA is responsible for...

Let me get this straight, they want to kill a state sponsored media company, PBS, and then turn right around and propose a state-run medical journal?!?! Do they not see the hypocrisy in their proposal?

No they don't.

If Conservatives were able to spot hypocrisy in themselves we wouldn't be here.

Do you really still believe that hypocrisy is something they care about at all? They've never cared about it.

Telling a conservative they're being hypocritical is like telling them they're violating Sharia Law. They do not care, and they might even take pride in it. The concept of operating according to a set of principles or a standard of morality is completely foreign to conservatives, and they think other people are stupid for worrying about that crap. Anything that increases their rank in society (whether real or perceived) is good. Anything that harms others is good.

I urge you to read this and then share it with other people as appropriate. The sad reality is that much of the electorate does not care about hypocrisy, even the people who complain about hypocrisy when they perceive themselves to be on the losing end.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/its-not-hypocrisy-youre-j...

big government is bad. therefore we should have government run journals. i imagine there's zero history to look at ([C]CCP) for evidence to why this is bad.

> big government is bad. therefore we should have government run journals.

IIRC, RFK is not a small-government conservative at all. He's a big-government liberal vaccine crank. He's the HHS secretary not for any kind of conservative ideological affinity, but because of a quid-pro-quo for throwing is support behind Trump during the election.

The Trump administration is weird.

that is true, but he _has_ been slashing and cutting government programs. i think you're right and it's just his personal agenda coinciding with this, but the overall hypocrisy is just wild to me. not sure how anyone who voted for Trump can rationalize stuff like this.

Big government is bad unless THEY are the ones running big government. It's the same with states' rights. They're all for states' rights until the state does something they don't like.

3CP1 has hijacked C-SPAN

Reply on news.ycombinator.com