Taking the headline at face value, though, they’re not wrong at all, and this is something I’ve tried warning folks over myself for several years now. Our collective response to COVID was truly the alarm bells going off (vaccine conspiracies, anti-masking, denialism, etc), and now we’re seeing an anti-science (and anti-reality) administration celebrate the gutting of our scientific prestige in the name of nostalgia for -isms. While authors and commentators are handwringing over whether the US is “cooked” scientifically, those in the know or who are observant already know the answer is an emphatic YES.
With the present attack on science, we’ve effectively outsourced one of the last remaining industries that kept us afloat as an empire. We have no real manufacturing (at least of anything others want), and what we do make is of decreasing quality so that shareholders can get paid (e.g. Boeing jets, American cars, and now even SIG handguns - if we can’t make decent planes, cars, and guns, then what do we even export besides raw materials/agriculture?). Without science driving R&D, we won’t even have the patents on innovative new medicines, technologies, or energy sources that we can export abroad.
So yeah. We’re done as an Empire. This isn’t something we can roll back next election, and I don’t think the current crop of Americans have felt enough pain to suddenly grow cooperative and engage in self-sacrifice for the greater good.