The production of ignorance is booming as its trajectory takes it from roots in advertising, then lobbying, then political campaigns to center stage in political strategy and official government business.
I suspect the academics who study culturally cultivated ignorance will be playing catchup for at least a decade after this administration!
(Assuming they are still around, of course.)
We wouldn't want to become one of those! As long as we never hold leaders accountable I'm sure we'll be safe from that fate.
Once they eradicate "wokeness" from the government, then they can just declare something or someone "woke" and then get punitive with them. Or at least that's one way I think it could play out given the actions being taken.
And the J.D. Vance nominated judge will say "not guilty!"...
This is a super interesting perspective.. but instead of only looking to the future, could we apply this to the past?
aka Were there predictions about global warming in 2015, 2000, or earlier that drove policy that ended up being incorrect?
If you think of any (societal) issue you care about, there's a good chance it would get solved with that tiny change
The specificity required of legislation to enact such a thing would be ridiculously un-tiny.
But, yes, it should be done, it should exist, it is the right thing to do, it is worth the effort.
A delicate issue I see is how to handle personal matters that the public don't need to know.
Anyhow, you might think that it's hard to know when someone is really lying vs just being uninformed, but in truth in the long term most lies become apparent; while you couldn't prevent every single lie, you'd reduce them enormously, in my opinion; even in countries where the president doesn't lie almost constantly.
But, how's that's going for us recently...
Not to mention its absence in a president's second term...
Donald Trump is 79. He can only be held accountable in the afterlife, if there is one.
Fox News literally had a segment on the difference between pedophilia and some other philia whose name I forget.. it was basically saying hey they weren’t 5, they were 14-16! That’s different! Wonder why they’d feel the need to air that viewpoint…
> Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests.
The Kochs also fund Nova on PBS which has produced and continues to produce a large amount of in-depth scientifically accurate reporting about climate change.
> People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart
But there are experts and there are smart people who write about what they experts say. Someone doesn't have to be either an expert themself or smart themself to realize that they should try to find what those experts and those smart people think in important areas so they can better choose politicians who will handle policy in those areas correctly.
A heck of a lot of voters put in less effort looking into competing claims of rival Presidential candidates than they do to check out the claims of rival manufacturers when they want to buy an air fryer.
Yes, the politicians that do bad things should be blamed, but I'm also going to blame the people who voted for them if the politicians said they would do those things and even a little research by the voter would have turned up that those things are bad.
It's amazing how fast free speech has been destroyed in the past year. Especially when it comes to censorship of science and science's conclusions.
However, I heard many many more people complaining about a lack of free speech in 2023 and 2024 than now. I really wonder what happened to all those principles! It's shocking.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles,"
The MAGA people, believe it or not, say very similar things about you.
It's a problem how many people seemingly have broken lie detectors these days. I blame social media for this one: far too easy to find a truthy bubble that validates your beliefs.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then - yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
This doesn't really have anything to do with constitutional "free speech". This is a government agency, not the personal research blog of a private citizen.
Government agencies don't have "free speech".
That said, it's a shame this is happening. Maybe a future administration will reopen it.
Future administration?
You can take them up on polymarket.
If I can buy, say, low probability insurance that that will give me a squad of mercenaries and a jet to a bunker somewhere safe, I’d be far more apt to put my money where my mouth is.
It’s not a bad bet. It’s just a dumb bet. The payout doesn’t match the risk.
We’ll see how ICE at select polling places and iffy federal-run voter role purges go in 2026. Should set the tone for how far they try to go in 2028.
It’s not like they didn’t already use both covert and overt means to try to overturn an election, and get caught red-handed on both (I mean, one was televised live, so…) Much cleaner to put in the effort on Election Day itself.
India can do it. They had a caste system and yet conduct fair and honest. We can do it too.
My understanding is that, in many ways, government agencies are more constitutionally protected speech-wise than private entities, precisely because any hierarchical attempt to punish them for their speech would be coming from the government rather than private entities. IANAL (or even American) though so grain of salt.
In any case, a lot of the right-wing hypocrisy around free speech that was being called out by OP didn't have much to do with constitutionally protected freedom of speech either - it was complaining about things like private companies (e.g. Twitter) shadowbanning people.
That's government employees.
If an employee of a normal company goes to a bar after work and trash-talks their boss, they can get fired for it.
If an employee of the government does the same, they (probably) can't.
This only covers speech that's not the of the job, and only things that are of "public concern" whatever that means.
"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." U.S. Const., Art. II, Sec. 1, cl. 1.
(There are so-called independent agencies, but the constitutionality of true independence is in question in the Trump v. Slaughter case. You can read about it at https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/25-332 or https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/12/court-seems-likely-to-sid... or https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/17/trump-v-slaughter-was-t... or https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/09/some-answers-to-justice... )
Speech is important. Scientific speech more important. A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future. You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet another scientific research institute. To me it seems more productive to get more specific and more substantive from there: How much of the research presently carried out at NCAR will continue? Are there alternative institutes or sources of funding that might save some of it? What are the likely tangible implications? Is the whole place even closing down or just some of it?
Going in the other direction, less specific, more amorphous abstraction about whether or not this is a free speech issue risks derailing the conversation into semantics.
There are interesting questions about wider meaning of free speech than what's protected by the first amendment, but getting moralistic because someone doesn't consider this a free speech issue, while you both agree that it's government defunding a research institute, and that it's bad, seems unnecessarily fractious
Yes. They were motivated by private individuals losing their livelihood, rather than by organizations losing government funding that was not a priori owed to them.
> You should be livid and working to inform people how dangerous this is, not making poor excuses.
Or you could fund it.
These are the same people who were "being censored by the media" while going on Fox News to complain about it.
Whining about freedom of speech, or the "demise of Western values", while banning school libraries worth of classic works of western literature for being "subversive".
Their heads would probably explode reading Plato or J.S. Mill.
Did you interpret the calls for the end of censoring and cancellations that all government agencies must continue to exist forever?
And if so is there any resemblance of logic behind that interpretation?
Free speech doesn't create an obligation. It's not a binding magic. It's irrelevancy hasn't just happened. It's been a slow death.
The shift to information age and science education did not start until after the Boomers and much of GenX were in and out of school and college. The world for them was cheap and just winging it. Science! Bah! Uncle Rico can still throw them balls over that mountain!
Was warning people 15 years ago the now 80 year olds in charge are nihilistic and not going to change; they will be dead and are just trolling youth about caring. They’re self selecting biology.
Takes $800k/yr to have the buying power $200k/yr had in 1980. The rise in inequality and the global temperature follow a growth pattern that was way too normal to be winging it; what's been allowed economically has been very carefully studied and managed to preserve freedom of agency for the elders. Same as environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
Same old stupid political inanity as when I was younger. It still works on a lot of people.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised about this at all. If anything, I think it might even be the same cause: because climate change sceptics were being suppressed before Trump.
To be upfront: I'm not American, but it's hard not to notice how the narrative has changed all over the internet.
My personal perspective to the climate crisis has always been a defeatist attitude, I was always in favor of green energy etc, but that's primarily because it would also improve the local area, Air quality etc. from a climate change perspective, it was always pointless, because that's a global issue and cannot be solved by internal regulation in a singular country
What does the number of people that oppose the science have to do with anything in my comment?
People are stopping th research because they don't like the results, and make up lies about it (like calling it "alarmism") in order to censor further results.
They are willing to stop all sorts of basic weather results because of it.
How could I not be aware of the number of people, and what does that have to do with anything? Your comment seems to be operating on some logic that is not explained and that I can not guess.
Hope you had a great time on the Cray-1!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19990422184726/http://www.unixse...
I suppose China does not need american scientist to work in China. They just need to make sure they can't work in the US. Which they are doing.
The only "funny" outcome is that they manage to fund a startup that develops tools to alleviate climate change, and explicitly reserve them to countries and states that believed in climate change in the first place.
But that would be mean. So, of course Florida can have it. It will just be slightly expensive for them.
Governments should be responsible for preventing these types of externalities as one of their core functions. There is no incentive for markets, consumers, and companies to deal with this, yet the forecast costs of climate change and sea level rise are (and will be) massive. Many places have some weak patchwork framework of private insurance and FEMA style funds, but without an actual pricing and enforcement system there's no way out of the warming feedback loop.
I was extremely disappointed in the failure of my (Canada's) government to articulate what a carbon tax was or how it worked to voters, and that allowed the opposition from both sides to chip at it until now it's a politically toxic idea.
The game theory of international accords is increasingly falling apart and countries will try to undercut each other on carbon pricing.
America is moving fast towards some sort of fascism, and noone seems to be doing anything about it. So if you are American this is the time for you to rise up and show the rest of the world that there is another America. If you don't noone else will, and things will only get worse.
I'll leave you with a few quotes to get you started on your journey back towards a functional democracy:
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical" - Thomas Jefferson
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they've tried everything else" - Winston Churchill
Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" to Which Benjamin Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Godspeed. I wish you the very best as a country.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/16/trum...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/climate/national-center-f...
I am not sure but maybe because this lab is a relic of the 50s and the cold war when when both the Soviets and the US were racing to create a weather control weapon...
For perspective the annual budget for NCAR is about half the amount being spend on the new White House ballroom.