The Police State performance

On Sunday, June 8, my partner and I were at the MOCA Geffen Contemporary museum in Downtown Los Angeles, attending part of a day-long performance by Nadya Tolokonnikova (of the Russian anarchist feminist punk group Pussy Riot), called “Police State”. In the museum warehouse, she created a large, dark, cavernous space, with a red shining Russian Orthodox cross and a few church-like benches on a side, long white banners hanging and moving slowly in an artificial breeze created by a range of small fans placed near television sets on the floor, showing videos of Russian detention centers. A mock surveillance tower on a side had neon lights and a display of shiny propaganda slogans. In the middle of this space, Tolokonnikova had reconstructed her own detention cell, in which she sat, all day long, directing the eerie electronic music that filled the surrounding ambient. Visitors participated in the performance by walking around the space and observing the interior of the detention cell from a panopticon of small bean holes located all around the metal walls. The hypnotic sounds, mixed with voices, shouting of orders, and the unnatural calm of the warehouse-turned-cathedral conveyed perfectly the frightening, disarming sense of dread and inevitability of the fascist state. 

The performance, supposed to last all day, from 11am to 5pm, was called off prematurely at 1:30pm. The reason: the street behind the museum, Alameda Street, that connects the Little Tokyo neighborhood where the Geffen Contemporary is located to Union Station, the busy central railway hub of Los Angeles, is also the location of the ICE detention center, and a small crowd was assembling along the street to peacefully protest the ICE raids in the city and the unconstitutional deployment, against the will of the California government, of the National Guard soldiers as a de facto military occupation. The whole area was being closed off, including the local Metro train station of Little Tokyo/Art District, in preparation for an all-out assault on the peaceful protest by those who supposedly should have been in charge of “keeping the peace”. The assault began very shortly after we walked through (and recorded video evidence of) a very peaceful and harmless protest. Ironically, the performance about the “Police State” had to be called off to make room for Trump’s actual Police State, militarily occupying and violently assaulting our city. And indeed, the performative value of this completely unnecessary display of force in LA is obvious: fascism thrives on violence as a performance act. The regime needs the spectacle of the whirlwind of chaos and destruction it is creating. The mainstream media showed images of chaos, casually neglecting to mention that there was no chaos at all anywhere to be seen in Los Angeles, up until the moment when we started having masked secret police in unmarked vans abducting people from the streets without warrant, up until the time when peaceful demonstrations were being violently attacked, and people started defending themselves. We have Marines trained to kill enemy combatants deployed in our city streets: is the American population now officially the enemy of the state? 

What has all of this got to do with science? Everything. 

The map of disappearing science     

Rewind the clock back a few weeks. In a very short span of time, the government unleashed a barrage of coordinated attacks aimed at destroying and dismantling science in the US. 

Two main government agencies that fund a large portion of scientific research in the country are the NIH for medical research and the NSF for every other field of research encompassing pure and applied mathematics, physics, computer science, biology, chemistry, etc. For about three quarters of a century, government support for scientific research has been a crucial part of American politics, at first motivated by the enormous war time enterprise of the Manhattan Project and the building of the atomic bomb, followed by the Cold War, at a time when the Soviet Union was in turn massively investing in scientific and technological development. After the end of the Cold War era, government support for science ebbed and soared depending on the vagaries of the legislation, but overall continued to provide a steady stream of funds that maintained the prominence of American science on the international scene and made the US a destination of choice for many scientists and students of the sciences from around the world. Both NIH and NSF, as well as many other government agencies involved in funding the sciences, like NASA and the DOE, became well-oiled machines in which the submission and selection of grant proposals enjoyed a significant degree of political independence and of self-management by the scientific community, in the form of scientists taking on temporary or permanent jobs at these agencies and running the assignment and management of the awards. The system, like all large, centralized management systems, had inefficiencies and many aspects that can be subject to criticism, but it was, nonetheless, largely functional and maintaining a reliable supply of funds to scientific research. The situation changed drastically and catastrophically in the course of the past few weeks. 

The NIH suddenly terminated more than 1300 active grants and stalled allocated funds for a thousand more, and the projected cut to the NIH budget is around 40% (consider this carefully: a good 40% across all medical research will just be gone, including crucial studies on cancer, cardiovascular illnesses, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, infectious diseases, life threatening illnesses that affect large swaths of the population). I am not directly involved in medical research, save for some small ventures into the realm of mathematical modeling for neuroscience, but I have been, for the past three years, a cancer patient, like many other people in this country and elsewhere, who are still alive due to the existence of advanced medical research. About a week ago, at my last checkup meeting, an oncologist described a devastated scene at their main campus, which is one of the top cancer hospitals in the US, where their entire department of translational research (that turns foundational scientific results into practical treatments for patients) is in disarray due to the savage NIH budget cuts. 

The NSF had over a thousand active awards terminated in April. The full list has been traced and made available by scientists: as one can expect, the most massive group of terminations affects Education (science education is very frightening concept to a fascist regime), Biological Sciences (a threat for a regime that programmatically rejects elementary facts of biology like evolution by natural selection), the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, as politically suspect, and of course, under Geosciences, all the grants pertaining to climate science. However, apparently more surprisingly, one sees a large number of terminated grants in the Engineering Directorate, in the Computer and Information Science Directorate, and in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences. One might imagine that these sectors would be spared, as seen by the government as less “political”, but that is not the case. There is a direct political aspect to the terminated grants: under computer science, very visibly the plug was pulled on all grants studying the spread of disinformation and the use of advanced technology like current forms of AI for manufacturing and spreading false information. Since the regime is currently aggressively using such tactics, they surely do not want scientists after them trying to figure out ways to counteract this malevolent use of technology. That is in line with the rest, but the axe is also falling on a lot of fundamental theoretical science, in mathematics and theoretical physics. Indeed, if one looks at the projected budget for NSF, after Education (down 80%) the sectors that are more severely cut are Mathematics and Physics (down 67%). Why are these most theoretical sciences, traditionally seen as non-politicizes, so catastrophically affected? I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that it is the very nature of science as a way of thinking that is under assault. 

The structure of the NSF itself is being dismantled. The agency is structured in 8 directorates,

which in turn encompass several divisions, for a total of 37. For example, the directorate of mathematical and physical sciences includes the divisions of astronomical sciences, chemistry, mathematical sciences, physics, and an office of strategic initiatives. There are very good reasons for this type of structure: different fields of science function in different ways and have their own appropriate forms of producing and evaluating results. Moreover, they require very specific expertise. Grant proposals are evaluated by panels of experts, in different subfields within each NSF division. It would make absolutely no sense to try to evaluate a proposal in pure mathematics against one in atmospheric science. Even within different subfields of the same discipline very specific expert knowledge is needed. In an attempt to eliminate the self-governance and judgment by expert peers that is crucial to science, and bring it under political control, the government announced the elimination of the 37 NSF divisions and a drastic reduction to the number of programs, down to some five “clusters” defined by a collection of what looks to a scientist like a randomly selected collection of buzz words like artificial intelligence, quantum information, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science (yes, the same one they have been slashing in our major medical research centers). This catastrophic attack will effectively make it impossible to continue properly evaluating the scientific content of grant proposals, giving way to a very different type of evaluation, a vetting process based on loyalty to the regime, enacted through political imposition and authoritarian control. 

We can already see glimpses of what this future will look like: panels evaluating pending NSF proposals are still taking place, but scientists called to serve on these panels are given threatening warnings against speaking up against the political takeover.  The message they currently receive is a blatant act of censorship and feels like a threat:  “You are subject to he Hatch Act during the time the panel is convened because you are a “special government employee” during this time. Time and Place Restrictions: You may not engage in political activities while on NSF time. This includes posting on social media, discussions of the phone, among panelists or with NSF staff, and sending emails that include partisan political information. You may not wear or display on video and in person during panel anything with partisan political implications.” 

Other agencies do not fare better. According to Trump’s budget plan NASA will be canceling 19 missions that are ongoing and are actively producing top notch science: this means effectively throwing into the garbage 12 billion dollars, a huge amount of money already spent on building and launching and maintaining complex space probes. To what gain? In the proposed restructuring, the NASA workforce will drop back to what it was before 1960, before the space race, the Apollo program, the moon landing, but more importantly, before all the enormous advances in planetary science and exploration that spanned half a century, before the Voyagers, before we were ever even able to look closely at the worlds of our solar system. The only goal of pulling the plug on a lot of active missions, right in the middle of new discoveries, is exclusively to prevent science from happening in the first place. They prefer wasting a massive amount of taxpayer money rather than running the risk of having advanced knowledge of the universe to deal with (even when it was largely already paid for). 

Knowledge is in itself threatening to fascist obscurantism, knowledge that is based on verifiable facts, on reproducible observation. The fact itself of seeking such observable verifications of claims is threatening to a regime that bases its existence on a bubble of manufactured reality. It is not just knowledge with immediate practical applications for the good of a human population they utterly despise (things that save lives, like cancer research and epidemiology, say) that they seek to destroy, but even abstract knowledge about the moons of Jupiter, about the depths of space, even the very act of thinking about the fundamental laws of nature. As observed above, it is in fact no surprise at all that one of the largest and most aggressive cuts to the NSF budget is aimed at the place, the mathematical and physical sciences, where rigorous proofs and careful calculations train the mind to a profound degree of critical thinking, and lead to expectations of a very high burden of proof from any self-proclaimed authority. Regimes do not tolerate scrutiny and critical inquiry. 

Harvard at high noon

The cancelled grants and the dramatic projected cuts are not the only aspects of this multi-pronged attack against science. A larger attack on the whole system of higher education and research is under way.  The capitulation of Columbia University to absurd demands from the Trump administration showed to everybody what history had already taught us long ago: giving in to fascism’s threats and violent demands does not give rise to a more moderate fascism, it just allows them to more rapidly escalate towards the more extreme part of their agenda. Harvard was the next university caught up in a standoff at high noon. As a visible symbol of academic excellence, it became the testing ground for every possible strategy of attack, from withholding of federal grants and fellowships to revocation of all international students’ visa, increased taxing of the endowment, threats to accreditation, etc. A barrage of blows, delivered in the hope that at least one of them would stick and evade being torn down in the court system. If any goes through, it will certainly be immediately applied to every single research university across the country. Chinese students are singled out as a target, largely because, as the current rising science powerhouse in the contemporary world, they do provide a significant pool of talent to American universities and scientific research, so blocking their influx is and easy way to guarantee substantial damage to science in our country. Indeed, international students are now wary of accepting graduate scholarships in the US, European governments are aggressively attempting to recruit US scientists exhausted by the burden of living and working in an environment that more and more resembles a battlefield, and the dismantling of American science is well underway.

Why is science so frightening to fascists? There is a close affinity between what is happening in our cities and in our classrooms and labs. Both our big cities and our academic centers of research and higher education share some key characteristics that fascism cannot tolerate. Both are, by nature, extremely cosmopolitan and do not care about the nation states, with their antiquate and ridiculous borders. In science, we literally are citizens of the cosmos. In our beloved large metropolises, we are citizens, in the original sense as city-dwellers: we live and enliven the city as our magnificent, creative world of possibility, rich with diversity, a hub of ideas, innovation, hard work, and novelty, in continuous transformation, a gate to a better future, built collectively and shared by us all. This dynamism, that continuously reimagines itself in new forms, that does not cede to domination and to authoritarian control, that fights to protect the more vulnerable but equally important part of our society, is the hope that an ever more unstable and bloodthirsty end-of-days fascism is desperate to suppress.  

Extreme anti-Realism, extreme anti-science

Another aspect to these wars on science and on cities, which I have mentioned repeatedly already, is the natural tendency of fascism to reject and attack complex systems, while clinging to an oversimplified magical vision of a non-existing mythical great past. There is something else though that deserves attention. The extreme right of the 21^st century, that largely presents itself as a copycat revival of the historical fascisms of the early 20^th century, has one novel ideological aspect: it is embracing an extreme form of anti-Realism, that would make even the staunchest postmodernist of the late 20^th century gasp in disbelief. The idea that facts do not exist, that claims require no connection to a verifiable reality, has become a common currency of the regime. If the historical fascisms of the past century had been very effective propagandists, masterfully seizing control of the emergence of the first mass media, their contemporary descendants have largely outdone them, once again partly thanks to the latest advances in technologies of communication, and novel ways to manufacture and spread massive disinformation. 

The simultaneous rejection of science and the seizing of information technologies may seem contradictory, but it is again useful to analyze what is happening in comparison to historical 20^th century predecessors. There have been careful studies of the roles of engineers, not only in the material technical support, but also in the refinement of ideology of both Franco’s fascist regime in Spain and Hitler’s nazi regime in Germany, from extractive industries to technological intervention in agriculture, to the overall connivence between technology and totalitarian control. The techno-feudalism currently emerging from Silicon Valley is playing an analogous role. The ideological divide between the scientists and the engineers experienced during Italy’s Years of Lead in the 1960s and 1970s, with many theoretical physicists militating in the ranks of the leftist radical political groups and a number of engineers entangled with the fascist eversion is another such historical precedent. In the situation we are facing today, this ideological difference led to the rise of the horde of DOGE centurions recruited among engineering interns, happy to lend a hand to the destruction of science. A significant motor today is the widespread mythology according to which science is unnecessary because artificial intelligence will make it obsolete. This extreme anti-science stance is becoming widespread among the engineers involved in AI development. The fact that ChatGPT predicts the next word makes it obsolete, they claim, to develop a scientific theory of language. The fallacy lies in confusing prediction with explanation. In science the capacity to make predictions is important as a way to render theories falsifiable, to test theoretical hypothesis, but predictions without a theory to test are useless. The goal is not predicting or simulating nature. (We already have a perfect simulation of nature: it is called nature.) The goal of science is explanation and conceptual understanding of the natural phenomena. The rush with which some out-of-control AI experiments are being unleashed on the public, marketed as substitutes for practices they are not designed to handle, lies at the heart of some of the chaos we have seen exploding in the government agencies under the DOGE takeover: the mythical belief that AI will replace science and make it obsolete. At the same time, the DOGE actions are aimed at grabbing access to data, against all laws protecting individual privacy, and a massive deployment of data mining technology is being unleashed on the data of the entire population, aiming for the creation of the ultimate dream of total surveillance: a database on every single person in the country, citizens, residents, legal and illegal aliens, with their financial, medical, social, political data stored together and easily searchable to easily identify large lists of possible targets of repression. There is no room for freedom, accountability, transparency, and individual agency in this totalitarian dreamscape. There is no role for science either.

American scientists, ever since the end of the Second World War, had grown accustomed to occupying a comfortable position of trust within the society, and of access to the centers of power, often in the role of wise men (rarely women) providing expert advise to government. It was physicists who convinced the US government to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere and to sign treaties reducing the threat of nuclear weapons. More recently, scientists sat on advisory boards ranging from environmental protection to public health, to security. They enjoyed having a say and being heard. They are now grappling with the shock of the sudden complete rejection of this long-established role. They have to deal with a new reality in which not only their advice is no longer sought, but they are actively cast in the role of enemies. A recent example was the sudden and brutal dismissal of the entire NSA advisory board, that included prominent scientists in oversight roles. Even in this case, a parallel exists with what is happening in society at large. The big cities that have always enjoyed their recognition as the economic and cultural hubs of the nation, symbols of prosperity and innovation, are now facing changed conditions in which they are enemy territory to be conquered and militarily occupied and subdued. Rapidly adapting to this shock is of crucial importance, because failure to react promptly will narrow the possibility of any reaction later. The shock-tactics of the government is aimed at taking advantage of this disorientation to severely limit the possibility of action before resistance can effectively organize. And this is the lesson that Tolokonnikova’s “Police State” performance was trying to draw attention to: the dangerous rapid shrinking of all available spaces for action, for counteracting the destructive power of the regime. In the times of the Cold War, a volatile balance between superpowers was maintained via the deterrence of mutually assured destruction. Now the undeterred individually assured self-destruction, through which the Trump regime is rushing the whole country down the maelstrom of civilizational collapse, has reached a similar level of existential risk, not just for our country, but for the world. 

A candle in the dark

Carl Sagan once wrote that science is a candle in the dark. Indeed, science is one of the most radical and revolutionary acts of humanity as a whole. It is based on a simple yet profound underlying philosophical principle that the natural phenomena can be explained, that the universe is beautifully complex and deep, but ultimately knowable, that facts can be determined, and nature is structured and subject to universal laws. Science is a discipline of the mind, a habit of intellectual honesty, of free inquiry. It is a vast collaborative enterprise, without borders, which thrives by maximizing individual and collective agency, aimed at the collective betterment of humanity, a self-regulating shared body of knowledge, enhancing our collective understanding of the universe. Science has always been, by its very nature, extremely anti-authoritarian.  

So, what is it that we, scientists, can do? This is an appeal to my fellow scientists, a call to action. Remember that authoritarianism gets hold of power by progressively shrinking the space available for action, so one should use all resources that are available at any given moment in time, creatively imagining new strategy as this erratic situation keeps evolving. Here are some suggested strategies, invent and create more, but keep acting! 

Organize and educate: Trump is attempting to prevent research universities from recruiting the top talents that are needed to create the next generation of scientists, by attempts to block international students. If they are blocked from coming to us, go to them! Organize summer schools and series of lectures in places outside of the US where top talent can be recruited, use the help of our colleagues and collaborators in other countries. Make detailed videos of your lectures on your scientific specialty and make them all publicly available where the best international students can access them (like YouTube, and Youku or Bilibili for Chinese students). Make your work downloadable from your website. Establish ways to still recruit internationally, such as collaboration with a lab located in another country. It is likely that the regime will soon try to severely restrict some of these activities too. Use whatever can still be used while it is possible. Do not wait. 

Save the science: Save the data! Large scientific databases are being taken down from government sites. There is a widespread effort to back up data and maintain their availability elsewhere so that they do not disappear. Find how to participate in this effort to save and distribute scientific data in your discipline. Saving the science extends beyond just the data: save the literature! Create your own libraries. Especially if you work at a public university, do not expect your institution to maintain and protect the books and journal collections hosted by your academic libraries. Destruction of university libraries has been underway since quite some time already. Think seriously about creating an alternative. This may seem like an overwhelming task given the size of knowledge contained in a typical university library but focus only on your own research specialty. Think carefully about the books and the papers that are key to acquiring the knowledge crucial to your area of research: make an inventory. Create a space that is under your own control, not of some institution subject to government restrictions (your home, a space shared with some colleagues outside of the university? Be creative, invent your own solutions).

Engage with the public: We have already seen during the pandemic how the pandering of dangerous disinformation can have deadly consequences. The current attempts to silence and threaten scientists working for the federal government, dismiss them from their job, prevent them from speaking publicly and even meddling with their publications and participation in scientific conference, is a way to prevent public access to scientific truth. It is more urgent than ever to engage with the public. If the government dismisses a competent panel of immunologists that makes recommendation about vaccinations and replaces them with an incompetent no-vax fan club, then famous immunologists should form their own independent advisory committee and deliver recommendations to the population bypassing government interference. Scientific associations across different fields can set up their own broadcasting systems across both traditional and social media, providing regularly updated advisories to the population.   

Offer solidarity and support: The attack on science is not isolated from the attack on democracy and modern society that is unfolding in our streets. They are parts of the same destructive plan. Support and protect those around you who are the most vulnerable: your international students who rightly fear being abducted on their way between home and the lab or the classroom, those whose nationality is being targeted, those who depend on visa for the continuation of their research, subject to a capricious and irrational decision process, those whose anatomies and gender identity and bodily autonomy are under attack, those whose presence inside the academic and scientific community is once again being questioned. Our students are our collaborators and our future colleagues, and it is important to show to all of them that we stand united against this existential threat: an injury to one is an injury to all!   

Learn from history: Science has managed to survive and thrive against authoritarian regimes. In the time of Stalin, even at the height of the so called “science wars”, where the regime embraced Lysenko’s pseudoscience, genetics and serious biology were being taught, in home seminars and unofficial venues. Thanks to those efforts, when the Soviet Union dropped the Lysenkoist nonsense, biology quickly recovered and thrived. The key is to keep the knowledge alive, spread it, share it, engage your peers and the younger generation. While with destructive budget cuts having to rely on colleagues and collaborators outside of the US for experimental science will be inevitable, the more theoretical sciences can adapt faster to alternative venues and alternative forms. The pandemic trained us on how to continue collaborative work, conferences, and training of students via online zoom meetings. We need to view the current regime as another similar destructive force and use our experience on how to make our science survive. Again, the crucial thing is to occupy and use every possible space that remains available for action, for as long as possible, and continue to imagine and create new spaces when some come to be under attack.

Don’t look away: There is a sense in which science is political. Many scientists cringe at the idea, but physicists have come to accept this fact immediately after the first two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear physicists realized that they had to become engaged, politically engaged, if the world had to survive the new atomic era. And so, they did. In that time this meant attempting to advise governments about the risks of nuclear proliferation. In the present time, where science is viewed by our government as enemy, the dialog strategy might be exhausted and resistance may become the only viable option, but looking away is simply not on the table anymore. The survival of the planet and of humanity is at stake and science may just be our last hope. It sounds dramatic to state it this way, but the return of fascism on the geopolitical scene is accelerating the race to the abyss: it is no time to just stand on the side and watch. 

Science and science education are instruments of radical political resistance. They train us to inhabit a world where reality exists. Facts can be ascertained. Any authority is subject to inquiry and accountability. Any claim requires viable supporting evidence. A world where bullying and violent imposition do not set the rules, but careful observation, logical thinking, and intellectual humility do. A world that has a future. 
Los Angeles has been, for nearly a century, a hub of science in the nation. In LA, we love our science and we love our city, and we view, in Trump’s attempt to subdue both, with his border games, his threats, and his tin soldiers, an act as delusional as battling the windmills. We care for humanity and the planet. We cherish our diversity as our strength. LA has only one thing to say about Trump’s fascists: ¡No pasarán!

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