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The Powell memo, from 1971, contains advice to establish rightwing thinktanks, staffed by scholars friendly to the billionaire class. It also has a blueprint for the “Scientific Freedom” lecture series that Trump’s NIH head Jay Bhattacharya set up this year. These are longtime strategies. 1/

The Koch & Heritage/Project 2025 billionaire class is fully aware they can tie normal good-faith people up into knots by bear hugging “academic freedom” while quietly using their power and money to select speakers and academics that have pro-billionaire views. Check this text!

And this is right. What’s happening to science, like what’s happening to democracy, is corruption. Money and politicized government is being used to twist the pillars of our civic society. The COVID deniers who attacked Fauci were elevated by billionaires. Regular ppl see that as corruption.

We have a science crisis because we have a corruption crisis. Cancer and Alzheimer’s cures in America are being exploded why? To allow the Trump admin and their donors to increase their power and direct money to their cronies. The fall of NIH and NSF this year at root comes from corruption.

(NIH and NSF seem small relative to the fall of the whole American republic and our freedoms, and concentration camps. Which they are. But they are collateral damage from a rampaging corrupt rightwing elite donor class.)

This too. And what is the future plan for science? My take: it will be built on a free and fair marketplace of ideas; distributed decision making where the sci community uses peer review to choose the best science—one piece of scientific integrity; public investment, and real freedom of speech.

Last, over the yrs there’s has been lots of criticism of Powell memo discourse as conspiracy theorizing. Some criticism is needed: it’s not fair to say the Powell memo laid out all the steps of a 50-year written-in-stone evil plan. But it DID sketch a big-picture strategy for that 50 year evil plan.

So we don’t need to get too far out over our skis. The Project 2025 White House isn’t using the Powell memo 50 years later as an explicit roadmap. But the principles in it had an impact on the institutional big-money right, and we see strands of the ideas in a lot of moves even today. /end

h/t @brainwashingdad.bsky.social ,who made a documentary 15 years ago that featured the Powell memo, alongside her Kennedy-Democrat Dad’s story of being influenced by the right and the media.