The newly-formed organization Stand Up for Science has been organized mainly by science students and graduate students who felt an urgent need to respond to the big attacks on science coming from the MAGA Trump regime. Since they did not see anyone else doing what they felt was needed, they called for protests around the country on March 7. They are raising the slogan “We’re Standing Up for Science—because science is for everyone.” Their website raises three demands: 1) Secure and Expand Scientific Funding; 2) End Censorship and Political Interference in Science; 3) Defend Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in Science. 

Stand Up for Science has spread around the country. Their main protest is in Washington, DC, and over 30 other cities have announced protests with more cities still joining in. The list of cities holding protests now sponsored by Stand Up for Science can be found here. A map with sponsored protests and not-yet-sponsored protests can be found here. 

It is very important that scientists, science students, and supporters of science across the country are taking to the streets at this urgent time and standing in opposition to the assault from Trump MAGA fascism. As Bob Avakian talks about in his new interview, many will be starting out thinking that the government will listen to their very sensible and rational voices. It is very important to bring to these protests a bigger picture of just what Trump represents, that this fascism is a product of this system, and that this is a time when an emancipating revolution is more possible.

The Trump MAGA Fascists Are Carrying Out a Many-Sided Attack on Science

Under a blizzard of lies, including that they are “cutting the bloated government budget,” Trump and his regime have carried out a massive assault on science, at this point mainly focused on government science and scientists. Government science websites with vital health information have been stripped. Crucial research projects of many different kinds—including health, climate change, biology and many other fields—have had funding suddenly slashed, important research derailed. There have been mass firings in branches of the government carrying out important scientific work, including scientists who work on things like predicting weather. Meetings on public health have been abruptly cancelled because the titles of the discussion include words that Trump has banned—those who attend such meetings might have their funding slashed. 

To give a sense of the words that have been banned from government funded science (and a big part of science in the modern world is funded by the government—the majority of the funding for research into fundamental scientific questions in the U.S. is funded by the government), one list of banned words circulating at the National Science Foundation includes: women, disability, bias, status, trauma, Black, Hispanic communities, as well as socioeconomic, ethnicity and systemic. And there are other lists percolating through the government that include "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based" and "science-based."

Banning these words will have immense and devastating effects. Even the ability of doctors to access health information from government websites (one of the key places certain kinds of medical information is systematically gathered) about conditions among “banned” sections of the population is thrown into doubt. Banning the words translates quickly: into the erasure of transgender people from public existence; into the even more naked, raw and brutal oppression of Black and Latino people. The effects on the health and lives of millions will be devastating and has already begun. Many people will die, and this is fully understood by the fascists in power. 

At the Heart of the Attack on Government Science Is an Attack on Science and the Scientific Method Itself

Amid what can seem to be the bewildering complexity of the many-sided assault on government science there is a core. This is why among the banned words you find “evidence-based” and “science-based.” Science, and scientific thinking and method, is at odds with what the fascists need to and must instill in their fascist base and in society as a whole. This excerpt from the article “Trump’s Cabinet: Forging a Fascist Machine—Part 2: Public Health—'Belief’ and Prayer vs. Reality-Based Science” lays out what is involved:

In “Conspiracy Theories, ‘Certitude,’ Liberal Paralysis, Or A Scientific Approach to Changing the World” (short version), Bob Avakian quotes Ardea Skybreak (a professionally trained scientist and advocate of the new communism) on the meaning and importance of science:

Science is very different than religion or mysticism, or things like that, which try to explain reality by invoking imaginary forces and which provide no actual evidence for any of their analyses. By contrast, science requires proof. It requires evidence.

and

Without science you are at the mercy of being manipulated, of having your thinking manipulated and not being able to tell what’s right from what’s wrong, what’s true from what’s false.

This goes a long way to explaining why fascists like Trump oppose science, and in fact deny the existence of “objective truth” altogether. Their project depends on manipulating the grievances, feeding the prejudices and stoking the anger of their supporters, in order to weld and wield them as supporters or shock troops of open violent dictatorship. And it depends on intimidating, paralyzing and rolling over their opponents. 

There is an overriding aim of the fascist assault on science, including on climate science—to smash down the influence of science in society, to undercut the prestige and social reach of scientists and the scientific method. Even as the fascists, running a modern imperialist society, have to maintain and develop a cadre of scientists for economic and military reasons (they want new powerful weapons, for one thing), at the same time, they have to do everything they can to train masses of people in completely unscientific and anti-scientific methods of thinking, and to beat down the hold of actual scientific thinking among the people. 

If the fascists can fully carry out this assault on science, it increases their ability to cohere their grip on society overall.