We Can't Change What We Don't Know.

You can't disagree in the face of facts if there aren't any facts to begin with.

Within the deluge of news this week, a few smaller items gave me more chills than thinking about a man that is the physical embodiment of Butthead running the DOJ. Abroad, it was Putin banning adoption of Russian children by countries that “allow gender transition”, a law that has no real point other than to play into the culture war (Russia banned adoptions to the U.S. in 2012, by the way). Putin also made it illegal to promote childlessness. This dovetails into what I really want to talk about domestically:

This week, Georgia dismantled their maternal death committee after it was leaked that two women died as a direct result of the state’s abortion ban. This says everything about what one has to ignore in order to have any argument in favor of a “pro-life” policy. We all knew this was inevitable, and those in power have no interest in being proved wrong. They don’t care if women die. Their priorities are clear.

This is all while the DOGE committee is promising to cut, I don’t know, as much of the government as they personally find distasteful? Ramaswamy is already making fun of government funding into the sex lives of beetles as a reason to prove that the government is wasting money (Do you know that the purpose of that study is literally to find out why males exist? Ironic? I think so.) And it is so easy to hide the goal of defunding research that would support good policy behind the veil of “cutting costs.”

There are a lot of ways this cost-cutting is going to have a direct effect on vulnerable people, like cutting Medicare and Medicaid - that part is obvious. But I want to focus on the long-term effects of defunding all the other research that supports a healthy democracy. Sociological, scientific, and economic research is often all we have to prove that the maternal death rate is increasing as a direct result of abortion bans, or that vehicular deaths were a public health problem that were directly solved by the widespread adoption of seatbelts. Now think about how quickly we’re diving into space colonization, AI, and self-driving cars as unbiased government research funding is going down the tubes. The private companies will only be responsible to themselves (look at how well that worked for Boeing), to the point where we won’t know what’s going wrong until a spectacular tragedy happens that we can’t ignore.

This is how Chernobyls happen, but they don’t happen overnight. It takes decades of research funding gaps and a lack of checks and balances, and many quiet deaths like the ones in Georgia before a majority of people pay attention. By the time something this bad happens, will we still have the power to change anything?

I know a lot of people are focusing on the more spectacular and dramatic possibilities that could occur under this administration, but I want to urge people to look at the quieter ways the functioning parts of our government are going to erode. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the #resistance succeeded in some ways but massively failed in others, and I think the biggest failure was that the 2016 resistance was too narrow in its goals. Reproductive rights are essential to freedom, but they exist within a web of interconnected rights that guarantee freedom to all. I think we were fighting for the right things under an incomplete framework, one that was so easy for the far right to both coopt and undermine.

I’m going to write more about how the right coopted identity politics and #resistance culture after the holidays and used it against us, but for now, I just want to say: Please, please have that argument over thanksgiving dinner this week.