Trump's War on Science and the Echoes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao

How history's darkest chapters teach us to recognize and resist the current assault on knowledge itself

In 1943, while Nazi Germany burned books and purged universities, a group of scientists at Los Alamos worked quietly in the desert of New Mexico. They included refugees who had fled Hitler's regime, physicists like Hans Bethe and Enrico Fermi, whose colleagues back in Europe faced persecution for practicing "Jewish science" or refusing to bend their research to ideological demands.

I thought about those Los Alamos scientists recently while reading about the state of American science under the Trump administration. Since January, more than 1,450 NIH grants have been terminated, withholding more than $750 million in funds. This is the systematic dismantling of scientific inquiry itself.

The Systematic Dismantling

The mass cancellation has no precedent in NIH history. Out of tens of thousands of grants overseen by the institution since 2012, it terminated fewer than five for violations of terms and conditions. Then Donald Trump was reelected.

The pattern is chillingly systematic. More than 550 of the terminated grants focused on health disparities or inequities, aiming to understand why certain groups experience different health outcomes. Research on maternal health in Black women? Cut. Studies examining how discrimination affects Latino youth mental health? Gone. More than 300 grants focused on LGBTQ+ health care were terminated, including about 40 grants researching ways to prevent suicide in adults and youth. Dr. Amy Nunn at Brown University was forced to end her HIV prevention study in Black and Latino men. "Some of them are going to not stay on PrEP, and some of them are going to get HIV," her colleague Dr. Philip Chan warned.

This is what happens when politics overrules science: people die.

The Miasma of Magical Thinking

At the center of this assault on knowledge sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a deeply troubling worldview that reveals itself in his embrace of 19th-century medical theories. In his book "The Real Anthony Fauci," Kennedy continues to embrace the miasma theory, a medical belief abandoned in the 1870s when Louis Pasteur and others proved that specific microbes cause disease.

Years ago, I was walking through London and visited Broadwick Street in Soho, where there's a pub called the John Snow, not the Game of Thrones character, but the doctor who founded modern epidemiology. Outside the pub stands a replica water pump, marking the spot where, in 1854, Dr. John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from the Broad Street pump. By mapping the deaths and realizing they clustered around this one water source, Snow proved that cholera spread through water, not through "bad air," as the miasma theory claimed. When he convinced local authorities to remove the pump handle, the outbreak ended.

Snow's discovery was revolutionary because it overturned the miasma theory, the belief that diseases were caused by "bad air" or poisonous vapors from rotting matter. Standing there outside that pub, I thought about how that single insight, that germs, not vapors, cause disease, transformed medicine forever. It led to antiseptic surgery, antibiotics, vaccines, and every modern medical breakthrough that has saved billions of lives.

Kennedy apparently missed that lesson. "Miasma theory emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses," Kennedy writes. But as medical historians point out, "I will categorically say that miasma theory, as historians of medicine and science understand it, is not what he is saying it is, period."

The real miasma theory held that diseases were caused by inhaling "bad air" infected through exposure to rotting corpses, sewage, or vegetation. Kennedy has completely redefined it to suit his anti-vaccine ideology. He doesn't just reject vaccines; he rejects germ theory itself. "When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (aka virologists) blame the virus." This explains why, when visiting Samoa during a measles outbreak that killed 83 children, he urged vitamin A treatments instead of vaccines.

The impact of understanding germs has been enormous. About fifteen years ago, I was in Budapest speaking at a conference alongside Nigeria's Minister of Health about water and sanitation issues. I opened my talk with a story from that same city about Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who, in 1847, realized that when medical students washed their hands in chlorinated lime solution before examining women in childbirth, the death rate plummeted from 18% to just over 1%. I had visited Budapest years earlier with my father, who, as a doctor, was familiar with Semmelweis and wanted to see where this breakthrough had occurred.

Semmelweis discovered this before anyone understood bacteria; he just noticed that doctors coming straight from autopsy rooms to delivery rooms were killing their patients. Once medical experts understood the importance of preventing germs in medicine, it transformed everything: surgery became safer, hospitals became healing places instead of death traps, and medicine became a science instead of guesswork.

Kennedy's rejection of this foundation explains his response to the current measles outbreak in Texas.

When Children Die, Minimizing Begins

In February, a school-age child in Texas became the first person to die of measles in the United States in over a decade. The child had not been vaccinated. Kennedy's response was telling: "We have measles outbreaks every year. Last year there were 16. So it's not unusual."

But doctors disagreed. "Classifying it as 'not unusual' would be inaccurate," said Dr. Christina Johns, a pediatric emergency physician. The current outbreak has over 500 cases, almost all in unvaccinated children.

Echoes of History's Darkest Chapters

This systematic attack on science isn't new. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, Trofim Lysenko promoted pseudoscientific agricultural theories while genuine geneticists faced prison or death. Lysenko claimed that plants could be "trained" to acquire new traits, such as growing wheat in Siberian snow, by simply exposing seeds to cold temperatures, expecting their descendants to remember the lesson. Soviet biology stagnated for decades, and millions starved when his theories failed in practice. But the damage went beyond science: the suppression of independent thought poisoned universities, cultural institutions, and ultimately the entire intellectual life of the nation.

In Nazi Germany, researchers promoted "Aryan racial science" while Jewish scientists fled or perished. The regime embraced bizarre alternatives like the "World Ice Theory," which claimed the universe was made of giant ice balls and that stars were just reflections of the sun off cosmic icebergs. This theory was adopted not because it made sense, but because it wasn't associated with Einstein, who was Jewish.

Even more absurd was the Nazi "talking dog" school. Hitler set up the Tier-Sprechschule (Animal Speech School) near Hanover, convinced that dogs could be trained to communicate with their SS masters for military purposes. One prized canine reportedly barked "Mein Führer!" when asked "Who is Adolf Hitler?" An Airedale terrier named Rolf supposedly tapped out letters with his paw, composed poetry, and even asked a visiting noblewoman, "Can you wag your tail?" The fact that this was taken seriously at the highest levels of government while it murdered millions of humans reveals the grotesque priorities of totalitarian regimes.

During China's Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, most scientific research ceased entirely. Scientists were denounced as "counter-revolutionaries" and forced to labor in the countryside for months or years. Even Einstein's Theory of Relativity was criticized as "bourgeois, reactionary, academic, and authoritarian;" meanwhile, China was developing nuclear weapons based on his theories. Universities were closed, scientific journals stopped publication, and subscriptions to foreign journals were canceled. The intellectual devastation lasted decades, setting back not just Chinese science but education, arts, and culture across the entire society.

I grew up in an era when the world looked to the United States for scientific leadership. We followed NASA's Apollo program with wonder, looked to America for breakthroughs in early computer science and technological innovation. The U.S. was the beacon of scientific freedom and progress. Now that beacon is dimming under political pressure, and the pattern extends far beyond science labs.

The absurdity of these attacks on science often masked their tragic consequences. In the Soviet Union, the suppression became so pervasive that jokes, 'anekdoty', became a form of resistance. One classic: A rabbit flees to Poland. "Why are you running?" asks a Polish hare. "Stalin has ordered the arrest of all elephants." "But you're a rabbit!" "Try proving that to Stalin." The punchline captures the Kafkaesque logic of totalitarian regimes, where even the laws of biology become subject to political decree.

The Assault Spreads Beyond Science

But the current attack on knowledge extends far beyond laboratory walls. The American Library Association reported a record high in 2023 with 1,247 demands to ban 4,240 books in public libraries and schools, a 65% increase from 2022. This wave of censorship targets history, race, gender, and LGBTQ+ topics, echoing the same politicization we see in science.

I have enjoyed visiting libraries all my life. I remember the fascination of being surrounded by books as a child in the children's library where I grew up. I recall the extensive book collection my parents had, which I loved to explore, even though I didn't fully understand most of it. And I have visited libraries all over the world. I'll never forget my fascination with visiting the Klementinum Library in Prague, that stunning Baroque masterpiece with its exquisite ceiling frescoes depicting the Greek Temple of Wisdom, spiral columns, and over 20,000 antiquarian books. When I was at Yale, you could often find me in the famous Sterling Memorial Library, designed like a European cathedral with its 60-foot ceiling and stained glass windows, where millions of volumes seemed to whisper the accumulated wisdom of centuries.

Sterling Memorial Library, Yale, New Haven, CT (my photo, 2014)

Walking through these temples of learning, I was always struck by the reverence for knowledge, the careful preservation of ideas both popular and controversial, comfortable and challenging. These libraries seemed to declare that knowledge belongs to humanity, not to political parties. Today, watching American libraries become battlegrounds over which books children should be allowed to read, I think about those sacred spaces and what we're losing when politics determines what knowledge is acceptable.

The pattern is identical to what we see in science: first, attack the credibility of experts, librarians, historians, or educators, then replace evidence-based decisions with political ideology. Historical scholarship is being rewritten to sanitize uncomfortable truths about systemic racism and civil rights. Arts institutions face political pressure to conform to ideological demands. The Trump administration's interference in cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center signals the same authoritarian impulse we see in science: the belief that knowledge and culture should serve political power, not truth.

The absurdity of a government's beliefs dictating the truth was also on full display when I visited East Berlin in February 1989, just ten months before the regime's collapse, though nobody expected that then. I visited a state-run historical museum that depicted history as a continuous struggle between the people and capitalism, starting from Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, and including Western democracies alongside Nazi Germany as enemies of the working class. The exhibits presented a highly politicized view of knowledge, where every historical fact was filtered through Marxist-Leninist ideology. History wasn't preserved; it was weaponized.

Standing in those exhibit halls, surrounded by distorted narratives masquerading as education, I realized I was witnessing exactly how authoritarian regimes control knowledge. They ban books, fire scientists, and then rewrite reality itself, turning museums, schools, and libraries into propaganda factories. The curators manufactured the government's version of history to serve the interests of political power.

What struck me most was how the regime's version of "truth" felt so absolute, so confident in its righteousness. Just as Lysenko's agricultural theories were presented as scientific fact, just as the Nazi talking dogs were seriously considered military assets, this museum presented its ideological distortions as historical reality. Ten months later, when the Berlin Wall fell, these same exhibits would be revealed as the hollow propaganda they always were.

The pattern is always the same: first, you attack the credibility of scientists, then you replace them with loyalists, and then you redefine what counts as legitimate knowledge.

Kennedy has already begun. On June 9th, he dismissed an expert panel of vaccine advisers that has historically guided the federal government's vaccine recommendations, saying the group is "plagued with conflicts of interest," not a convincing argument if that comes from the Trump Administration. The entirety of the 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the vaccine schedule and required coverage of immunizations, will be retired and replaced with new members.

Removing the entire panel prematurely is unprecedented. His replacements include Dr. Robert Malone, who has become a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement, and Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse on the board of The National Vaccine Information Center. That organization has been widely criticized as a leading source of misinformation and fearmongering about immunization.

But the attack on scientific expertise extends beyond vaccines. Climate science has faced systematic suppression and censorship. During Trump's first term, government climate scientists were forbidden from discussing climate change publicly, research funding was slashed, and environmental data was removed from government websites. NASA's climate monitoring satellites faced budget cuts, and the administration attempted to dismantle programs that measure the Earth's radiation budget, the very data needed to understand long-term climate dynamics.

The Resistance Emerges

But Kennedy and Trump have made a fundamental miscalculation: you can fire scientists, but you can't kill science itself. It emerges in unexpected places, carried by people who understand that knowledge is too precious to abandon to demagogues.

Hundreds of current and former NIH staffers published a declaration that same day, Monday, June 9th, cosigned by thousands of scientists worldwide, including more than 20 Nobel laureates, decrying the politicization of science and urging the NIH director to reinstate canceled grants.

Public health leaders have launched the "Vaccine Integrity Project," which will be aimed at assessing the best ways for vaccine proponents to safeguard vaccination policy and information should government recommendations and information sources become "corrupted." The project might go so far as to create a new independent body to evaluate the science supporting individual vaccines, a task that at this point falls squarely in the domain of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Scientists are finding ways to continue their work despite the funding cuts. Universities are reallocating resources. International collaborations are forming. Some researchers are pursuing opportunities abroad, taking American scientific expertise to countries that still value knowledge over ideology.

The Path Forward

But resistance alone isn't enough. Those of us who value knowledge and democracy must take action. Support your local libraries when they face book challenges. Vote for candidates who respect expertise and evidence. Contact your representatives about NIH funding and scientific independence. When politicians attack experts, call them out. When misinformation spreads, counter it with facts.

Throughout history, the most prosperous societies have been those that embraced science as a cornerstone of progress. Conversely, when governments curtail scientific freedom, whether through censorship, funding cuts, or ideological interference, they undermine their own future. We've seen this pattern from Stalin's agricultural disasters to China's Cultural Revolution setbacks to Nazi Germany's scientific isolation.

I think about that Klementinum Library in Prague, those childhood hours exploring my parents' books, those quiet moments in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library. Monuments to the notion that knowledge is the foundation of human progress, the light that guides us through the darkness, the tool that lets us solve problems instead of hiding from them. All of you who also read my other Substack newsletter, Daybreak Notes & Beans, will recognize the joy of discovering new knowledge every day. These days, just reading about scientific breakthroughs, conservation wins, or effective government measures that create a better society and protect the planet feels like joining the resistance.

In today's turbulent political climate, where science is too often seen as a threat rather than a tool, defending science is defending society itself.

The authoritarian assault on knowledge is real and accelerating. But so is the resistance. Science, truth, and human curiosity have survived tyrants before. They will survive these as well, but only if we defend them.

As citizens, our role is to demand that our leaders prioritize science, support researchers, and resist the politicization of truth.

When governments turn science into an enemy, scientists become the resistance. History shows us that in the end, the resistance has a good chance of winning. But victory requires all of us to stand up and be counted.

As an independent journalist, I do my bit; I hope you do yours.

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