At first it seemed that if this experiment in authoritarianism was going to break our hearts, we’d somehow stand firm. Now it’s pillaging our very minds.
The National Science Foundation last week canceled hundreds of grants to researchers studying the spread of disinformation online. This was the explanation: “NSF will not support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.” The cancelations are not subject to appeal.
This latest assault on science has nothing to do with protecting the right to free speech and everything to do with making it even easier to spread the falsehoods that are helping the administration undermine the rule of law and establish a police state in America.
Earlier this month, the Harvard Crimson reported on the termination of more than $110 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health to Harvard and its affiliated hospitals.
It’s hard to fathom how scientific inquiry could perturb a great nation’s leaders. But the canceled projects all included certain keywords in their abstracts, the Crimson reported. Those include ‘transgender,’ ‘vaccine,’ ‘race,’ ‘barrier,’ ‘inequity,’ ‘mental health,’ ‘underserved,’ and ‘minority.’
Science also contradicts the narrative of those who demonize immigrants as criminals. Researchers at Stanford found that first-generation immigrants were 60 percent less likely to be convicted of crimes and imprisoned than people born in the U.S.
Now, rather than do anything to bring legal Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, where he was illegally sent after being mistakenly kidnapped by ICE agents, the administration is just telling lies about him — that he is a convicted criminal and gang member. He has never been charged with a crime.
Reason is how humans handle the complexity that justice requires. Whether Abrego Garcia is innocent or guilty isn’t really the issue, as Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen pointed out. “I am not defending the man,” said Van Hollen. “I’m defending the rights of this man to due process.”
The same must be said of Roberto Jonathan Tejada, the Salvadoran who was arrested in a shockingly violent and probably illegal ICE raid in Dennis Port, as we reported a month ago. Tejada, 40, does have a record, from two decades ago, but he hasn’t been convicted of any crimes since then.
Research happens at newspapers, too. A team of New York Times reporters and researchers investigating who exactly our government sent to El Salvador on three airplanes on March 15 have delved into databases, court documents, and interviews but turned up little evidence to support the government’s claims.
It turns out that the disciplines of science and the rule of law have the same purpose: to find the truth through the careful, unbiased weighing of evidence. Will we find the strength to stand firm in this fight?
